If You Needed Somebody
by BlackIceWitch
Summary: 5th story in Ramble On series. 2009. Lucifer has risen and Sam's decision to stop hunting has left Dean on his own. To his surprise, he's found he likes it that way. In Manhattan, he runs into Ellie, both hunting soul-drinkers in the city that never sleeps. When Dean suggests they team up, he realises too late that it might change everything. No slash. No spoilers.
1. Chapter 1

**If You Needed Somebody**

* * *

_You know, one day you look at this person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere. And the person who was just a friend is suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with._

_~ Rain King, X-Files_

* * *

**Chapter 1**

_**August 2009. Central Park, New York City**_

The city's buildings towered around the park, glass and chrome and steel and concrete holding the day's heat and blocking the movement of the air, and the incessant whine of insects filled the water-laced and rocky woodland surrounding him, blurring and muting the sounds of traffic on the avenues to either side of the greensward. Dean slapped at the mosquito buzzing around his head, wondering why the damned city had to be so humid in summer. He shifted his position against the roots of the tree irritably as another protrusion dug into his back.

Aside from his current problem of being eaten alive by the smallest inhabitants of the Big Apple, he felt pretty good, all things being equal. He'd been working alone for a while, unconcerned by anyone else's needs, untroubled by the greater considerations of angels or demons. Everyone had left him alone and that, he'd gradually come to realise, was the way he liked it.

Leaning against the rough bark of the tree at his back, he acknowledged that he still didn't know what he was going to do about his brother, that he hadn't dealt with the blow that had driven them apart to begin with. He'd been doing his best not to think about it at all, and for once, it was working.

The faint snap of a twig in the nearby copse of trees brought his attention back to what he was doing. He stilled against the trunk, eyes half-closed as he listened. A moment later, there was a soft click, one rock falling against another, from the same direction.

Along the path that ran from one side of the park to the other, a solitary man moved into the pool of light cast by one of the few working overhead sodium lamps, his head down and hands in his pockets. Dean watched him pass by without moving. In his late thirties, expensive suit and shoes, the gleam of a gold watch on one wrist. One of the many success stories of the city, Dean thought distantly, filing the brief assessment away. The success had a taint; the man's expression was drawn, his concentration not on his surroundings, but directed inwardly.

The night air stirred, a vagrant sigh through the treeline along the path. It brought the faint scent of carrion with it as it brushed by Dean's cheek. Not so unnatural here, in the woodlands. Dead squirrel or bird could've been rotting up wind from him. He didn't think that was it and he tensed a little, his concentration at pin-point focus, rewarded with another crackle from the undergrowth beside the path, a hundred yards or so away on the other side of the narrow trail.

Sliding up the tree's trunk, he was careful to keep his movements incremental. Ten yards from him, the man had stopped on the path, his head cocked to one side, a puzzled frown on his face.

Dean eased around the roots of the tree, and began to move, placing his feet with care, holding the long silver awl flat along his flank.

_Dean? Dean! Help … help me … Dean, p-p-please._

The whispering call floated through the trees. Dean's jaw muscle flexed in response. He didn't know what the man on the path was hearing, but he could hear his brother's voice, calling him for help, hoarse and raw and desperate. It didn't really help to know it was a trick, a ruse to draw him closer, to trap him and kill him and drink his soul. The voice was very real, acting on the nerve endings and imagination like fire.

A flickered sideways glance showed him that the man had heard something he hadn't been expecting, his shoulders shaking. He stared at the woods that flanked the left hand side of the path, his expression a mixture of longing and despair.

Standing in the deep shadow of an out-thrust boulder on the other side, Dean watched and waited. If he moved too soon, the crocotta would escape. Sonofabitch monster had gotten away once in the last week and he wasn't prepared to let it happen again.

The suit turned towards the wood, taking a hesitant step toward the voice that called him. Far back, under the shadows of the trees, Dean caught the flicker of movement against the blackness. The man took another step, as the call floated to him again. In the faint light, Dean saw his profile, the tracks of his tears glistening dully down the sides of his face.

Stepping over the low bank of ferns and shrubs that separated the path from the woodland, the man hesitated again before the trees, clearly fearing the darkness beneath the canopy. The whisper called out to him and he took the first step that carried him into the shadows.

Moving away, Dean backtracked and crossed the path further down, angling back into the woods. He had maybe two or three minutes before the crocotta caught and drained his victim. That wasn't happening on his watch, not this time.

The trees closed in as he eeled between the trunks and the undergrowth, his night vision adjusting fast to the deepening darkness. He slowed for a second as he saw them; two figures standing close together in a tiny clearing, silhouetted against the lighter vegetation behind them. He watched as the man slumped forward, his limp body held by the monster as it lowered its mouth toward his face.

Dean ran, not worried about the noise he made now. He covered the twenty yards between them in seconds and jumped, the long, pointed awl he held swinging up into the air and plunging down into the back of the crocotta's neck even as it was pulling away, dropping its victim.

It struggled and thrashed on the ground in front of him, the metal driven through the spine and into the earth, and he shifted his weight over the creature's back, holding it down until the limbs stopped flailing and the chest subsided one last time under his knees.

Turning, he scrambled off the crocotta and crouched beside the guy, rolling him onto his back and resting his fingertips against the thin skin at the side of his neck. He was alive, his pulse strong. Pulling out a flashlight from his pocket, he flicked it on. The suit was a mess, he thought absently. The crocotta had hit the dude with a rock to subdue him and the headwound was bleeding profusely, as headwounds do. He felt around the long shallow cut carefully, checking the man's eyes and ears. Nothing moved under his fingertips and he thought there was a good chance there was no fracture.

Turning off the light and tucking it back in his pocket, he shifted backwards and gripped the man's wrists in one hand as he levered the body upright and took the dead weight over his shoulder. He straightened his legs and rose slowly, right arm hooked over the back of the man's legs.

He turned, walking out of the woods carefully, feeling for the ground before he committed to each step. Neither of them would cope well with a fall. The car was parked in a dark lot near the reservoir and if he didn't run into anything or anyone else, he'd be done with the job in an hour.

* * *

The small bar was densely packed, the mingled scents of perfume and cigarette smoke, alcohol and sweat combining with the heat to be near-asphyxiating. Doors and windows had been opened, the faints scents of traffic fumes, baked concrete and melted asphalt adding to the mix.

Dean leaned back against the counter, savouring the icy chill of a beer as he watched the Irish-flavoured rock band pounding out another song, the dull ache of adrenalin hangover and abused muscles fading bit by bit.

He'd dropped the vic off at the ER, telling the flustered nurse he'd found him in the park unconscious and left as soon as the guy was on a gurney. Finding a rare parking slot two blocks down, the noise and lights of the bar had drawn him with the promise of a few hours of thinking of nothing, and the possibilities of shedding the tensions of the last week. Job done.

On the small stage, the band switched to a quieter song, the lights dimming slightly as sweaty and heated and amorous couples squeezed together in the tiny, cleared space in front of the stage. Dean's gaze lingered appreciatively on the press of gyrating, scantily-clad ladies. He swallowed another mouthful of cold beer, his eyes roaming speculatively. The combination of the raw energy of the place, his satisfaction in the job and the chill fizz of the drink gave him the distance he was looking for, letting him be someone else for a while.

He watched the young woman make her way along the edge of the crowded bar toward him. Long, glossy, black hair was swept up into a soft knot on her head, loosened tendrils framing a pretty, dark-eyed face. She caught his gaze and gave him a slow smile and he let his eyes rove admiringly over her curves, outlined against the tautly-stretched fabric of a cut-off, sleeveless tee shirt and skin-tight, denim mini-skirt. A welcomed and familiar frisson of heat curled lazily through his groin as he returned the smile. His night was definitely picking up.

The flash of red hit his peripheral vision in the doorway to the street and he turned his head. Under the glare of the overhead lights near the pool tables, the vivid shade was unmistakable; copper-bright, loose and long. Without thinking, Dean reached back and put his beer on the counter, sliding off the bar stool as he tried to keep the owner of that hair in sight, mentally cursing the crowd closing in around her.

"Hey."

He looked down distractedly, seeing the curvy, dark-haired, young woman standing in front of him. She seemed vaguely familiar.

"Uh, hey," he said, gaze rising, peering over the top of her head as he caught another glimpse of red near the corner of the room. It was a big city, but he'd never seen that particular shade of red on anyone else, or the long, striding walk that reminded him of a cat.

"You looked kinda lonely," the brunette pouted, taking a step closer, her hands sliding under his tee shirt, long nails grazing over his skin. Glancing down in irritation, Dean took a short step back, catching her wrist and pushing her hands away. He suddenly remembered why she seemed familiar, but the glow had disappeared with the sight of the hunter and he didn't have the time or inclination for the brunette now.

"Maybe I can help?" she persisted, pushing back against his grip.

"Uh, yeah, not really," he told her, offering a half-hearted smile as he scanned the room again. "I-uh-no, look, sorry, I gotta go."

"What?"

"Have a nice night," he muttered, stepping around her and into the crowd, neck craning in the direction he'd last seen the redhead.

"Bastard!"

He heard the brunette's indignant exclamation distantly as he pushed his way into the crowd. Another glimpse of red closer to the back kept him working his way through the tightly-packed dancers in front of the small stage, but he was forced to a stop when he lost her completely a moment later. He turned around, wishing briefly he had his brother's extra couple of inches.

Knowing Ellie's ability to disappear without a trace even without a crowd to hide in, Dean scanned the bar carefully. The restrooms were behind him, and he ruled them out, deciding she couldn't have gotten past him without him seeing her, the room was too small. His gaze passed twice over the nondescript door to one side of the stage without noticing it. When it finally registered, he realised where it most likely led, pushing his way through the packed mob toward it.

The door opened just as he reached the short flight of steps that led up to it, and Ellie stood on the top step for a moment, talking to someone behind her. Her hair was loose, flame-bright and spilling over her bare shoulders and back. A thin, white singlet was stretched over her breasts and stomach, tight enough to show the lines of her ribs and the jut of her shoulder blades.

Dean's gaze dropped involuntarily, following the close-fitting, old and faded denim of her jeans down the length of her legs to a pair of leather sandals on her feet. The bulky and unfashionably huge leather backpack she carried with her everywhere was slung over one shoulder, and the cut-away of the singlet's sleeves revealed a tattoo on the flat plane of her right shoulder blade, a triquetra in a circle.

He felt an odd flutter in his stomach, seeing her again. The last time had been in Long Beach and the old easiness between them hadn't really been there. He tried to ignore his vague apprehensions as he looked up at her face. She was nodding to her companion, and when she turned back to the steps in front of her, her kohl-rimmed, jade-green eyes met his.

And passed over him without recognition.

"Excuse me," she said, her voice a little higher and crisper than he remembered, filled with the flat vowels of an upper-class background, the slightly nasal drawl of the East Coast. He backed away in confusion as she came down the stairs and walked past without looking at him again, turning to follow her as she headed through the crowd for the front door of the bar. Behind her, a man in his mid-thirties pushed past, glancing disinterestedly at him as he passed. The guy's hair was blonde, but strands of silver caught the light.

Dean leaned back against the wall beside the steps, watching as they exited the bar, feeling as if he'd been sucker-punched. It _was_ her, he was certain of it. The crescent moon birthmark lying under her collarbone had been easily visible over the scooped neck of the singlet. He didn't know why she'd blown him off. They hadn't parted on bad terms, at least, he thought, not that bad. She'd looked different, wondering if that had anything to do with it. He'd never seen her wearing make-up before, or with her hair loose, or for that matter, wearing anything other than shirts and jeans or fatigues. Had sounded different too.

_Some kind of trouble?_ He pushed himself off the wall, threading his way back through the packed floor to the door.

Running down the sidewalk to the car, he saw her get into a black Ferrari parked outside the bar and swore under his breath. The car – the get-up – the weirdness – he couldn't come up with a good explanation for any of it, and he wondered why the hell he was trying.

The city was full, the traffic crawling for the most part, and he managed to catch up with the car on Bowery, cutting off the yellow cabs with a reckless disregard for New York tempers as the low-slung car ahead of him switched lanes and made turns with the same insouciance. At Delancey, the Ferrari ran the red and he lost her, sitting at the intersection and watching as the car sped down toward the Williamsburg Bridge and disappeared in the sea of taillights.

Whatever was going on, he thought tiredly, whatever she was involved in, he couldn't help her now.

* * *

It was a little after one in the a.m. when he parked the Impala in the narrow lot behind his hotel, his thoughts still circling around Ellie's strange behaviour in the club, and he climbed the four flights of stairs to his room without noticing the smells of the one-star hotel, or the sounds of the other guests, or their televisions, in the rooms he passed.

His earlier buzz, the satisfaction of the hunt, the normal cheerfulness he felt working alone, those had gone, along with the desire to spend the night decompressing in the simplest and most effective way he knew. An image of the brunette's incredulous expression as he'd brushed her off replayed in his mind and he let out a gusty exhale, pushing it aside without much regret.

It'd been three – or four – months, he thought, since he and Sam had last seen Ellie. The vengeful spirit in Long Beach had taken the three of them to bring it down and send it on its way. At the time, he'd been too distracted by his brother's behaviour to talk to her much, and while she'd been cordial, the ease they'd had before hadn't really been there. _And whose fault was that_, he asked himself derisively, reaching the top landing and turning for his room.

_You don't need anyone._

He wondered if she knew what'd happened – to Sam – to the fucking world – when Lilith had died and the last seal had been broken.

_Lilith's going to break the final seal. _Zachariah's wide, completely insincere, grin returned with the memory of the angel's gleeful voice._ Fait accompli at this point. Train's left the station._

He'd believed the angels, even when he'd known that some of them were rotten. He'd believed he'd been raised for a reason, a means of redemption, a way to get the blackness off his soul. He'd been wrong. Lilith had _been_ the final seal and Sam had been put into position to kill her.

_Sam, Sam, Sam. Marcia, Marcia, Marcia. Forget about him, would you? You have larger concerns. Why do you think I'm confiding in you? You're still vital, Dean. We weren't lying about your destiny. Just ... omitted a few pertinent details. But nothing's changed. You are chosen. You will stop it. _The angel'd shrugged disinterestedly._ Just... not Lilith, or the apocalypse. That's all._

Cas had finally chosen sides and gotten him to the convent too late, his brother standing with Ruby in a state of shock as the first demon's blood had run across the floor and opened up the cage.

_You chose a demon … over your own brother._

He stopped at the door to his room, leaning against it as he tried to force that line of thought far away, back down where it hadn't been eating at him for the last few weeks. There was no question Sam would've done it all differently if he'd known. No doubt Sam's remorse was real and the fear of what he'd become, or almost become, was still what was driving his little brother. None of it changed the one simple fact that given a choice, between Ruby and him, Sam'd chosen Ruby. Had believed, been convinced, that he was the stronger. The only one to do the job.

He'd been right, Dean thought tiredly. Just not in the way either of them could've imagined.

Ellie hadn't believed the angels. Had told him whatever Ruby was doing, it wasn't for Sam's benefit, that the angels were playing a long game and he and his brother were just pawns, important for some parts, expendable for the rest. He closed his eyes, remembering the doubts she'd re-ignited in him, every time the subject'd come up.

It hadn't been that he hadn't wanted to believe her. He'd just wanted to believe in his purpose more. He'd needed to believe that he could undo what he'd done. Needed it bad enough to ignore his instincts, ignore what was right in front of him.

Pushing the key into the lock, he turned it and opened the room door, one hand slapping the wall beside the frame for the light switch.

The room, cheap and drab, leapt into stark clarity under the murky, low-wattage light, but he didn't notice the cracks in the walls or the old, tired furniture or the threadbare state of the dirty, grey carpet.

_Did she know that the devil was free and the apocalypse was under way?_ He thought of War, the first Horseman, and what it'd done to that little town in Colorado. The seals of the cage had been broken, and now Heaven was breaking the seals of the end of days, one by one, according to both Bobby and Cas.

Tossing his keys onto the dresser, he put the bottle of whiskey he'd bought on the nightstand and flipped on the small, ancient TV as he walked past. In one corner of the room, a tiny alcove held what the hotel called kitchen facilities. There was an electric kettle and a tray of cups, instant coffee in individual vacuum-sealed foil bags, tea bags, sachets of sugar and creamer. Two glasses completed the room's culinary inventory and he took one, stopping by the TV on his way back to the bed, twisting the knob to change channels until he came to a news broadcast.

_She would've talked to someone_, he decided, his attention only half on the screen. _Found out something_. And she hadn't called, or tried to get in touch. Had, in fact, he recalled with a reprise of the sense of shock he'd felt then, ignored him completely, only a couple of hours ago.

_You don't need anyone_, she'd said to him.

He hadn't told her she was wrong.

He needed people. Not many, just a few. To trust. To put his back against when the world was coming to an end. He'd already lost most of the people he'd loved and trusted, lost the scant few places he'd tentatively allowed himself to think of as home. He couldn't admit to anyone what those losses had done.

_Waste of time thinking about this crap_, he told himself, shoving the past back where it belonged. _Do the job_. That's important. That's something he could do.

He looked back at the TV as the anchor began to read out the days' news, forcing his concentration to where he needed it.

Only two items held his attention. The suicide of a high-ranking political aide this morning, inexplicable due to a lack of cause of death.

And two more deaths in Central Park.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Dean reached blindly back for the bottle as he stared at the flickering screen. He'd killed the crocotta, less than five hours ago. There shouldn't have been any more deaths. But the body count had doubled in the last five hours. Pouring whiskey into his glass, he tossed it back, and got up to change the set to another news channel.

Same story. A man killed, maybe an hour after he'd dropped off the guy in the ER. And a woman, killed less than an hour after that, her body found by a late-night jogger, not even that far from where he'd ganked the monster. The cops couldn't've searched the whole area, he thought. The body would be there till the morning sun got to it.

He turned back to the bed and pulled the army duffel from under it, dropping the big bag onto the end of the bed and unzipping it. His father's journal was wrapped in a handful of tee shirts and he unwrapped it impatiently, tossing the shirts back into the bag and flipping the pages until he came to the entry on the crocotta. Silver or iron stake through the spine. He frowned.

Yep, well that's what he'd done._ It couldn't be the same one. But they didn't hunt in packs. Or maybe they did?_

Picking up the glass, he poured another shot from the bottle, and shifted back to the headboard as he returned the bottle to the nightstand. Pushing the pillows up behind his back, his gaze alternated between the TV's screen and the book in his hand.

His father's entry on the creatures was thin. John Winchester had hunted one with the Tasarovs, years ago, and he and Sam had taken one down year before last, but the lore was shaky, and it seemed dependent on the culture. They were a type of shapeshifter and, like werewolves and shifters, were thought to hunt alone, territorial and independent.

Of course, he considered, skinwalkers were also shifters and they were happy to hunt in packs when the opportunity arose.

It was unlikely but possible there were a group of crocottas working together … or maybe just in the same greater metropolitan area, he thought, staring at the TV without seeing the images filling the screen. A really big city, like this one, was probably an ideal location. The streets were busy no matter what hour of the day, or day of the year, and there were a million dark and shadowy places to hide when calling their victims. And a million places to hide in plain sight in between meals.

In Ohio, the monster's voice had been his father's, exact in every detail, every nuance and shade and variation. And the damned thing had been able to pry into his skull enough to know about the demon, and about the deal, tailoring its conversations to seem bonafide, knowing things only his family had known.

He got off the bed, moving restlessly around the room, brows drawn together as he reviewed that case. There'd been discrepancies, even then, he remembered. The crocotta had sent him off to confront another guy, while luring Sam to the telco building. At the time, they'd figured the monster thought it would have no trouble with Sam and come calling for the souls of him and the poor schmuck he'd been targeted on after they'd killed each other. There didn't seem to be any other reason for wasting two potential kills otherwise.

It took him a couple of minutes to realise what he was looking for and another to remember Sam'd taken the laptop and he was going to have to get another one. Finishing his whiskey, he walked back to the bed, telling himself he'd go to the library in the morning, see if he could find more about the mythology of the creatures.

The brisk knock on his door was unexpected and he swung around, almost dropping the glass in his hand. No one knew where he was right now, not even Bobby. He set the glass down, and turned off the television, then walked to the door, unlocking it but leaving the chain on. Opening the door a crack, he stared at the woman standing there.

Ellie looked back at him through the narrow gap.

"Are you going to let me in?" She tilted her head to one side and smiled, one brow rising.

Dean stared back at her numbly for several seconds before closing the door and leaning his forehead against it. How the hell had she found him, he wondered, freeing the chain and telling himself the acceleration of his pulse was a left-over from the interruption of his thoughts, just an aftermath of the shock of finding out he hadn't finished the job after all.

He opened the door and stepped aside, watching her as she walked in past him. She looked around, and he got a bright snapshot of the room as she might've been seeing it; the drab and peeling floral wallpaper, thin, grimy carpet, the worn and faded armchair to one side of the sagging bed with its ugly, cheap spread and the short, lumpy sofa that matched nothing else in the room on the other. As he glanced around at the room's obvious deficiencies, a smell he hadn't noticed before registered as well. Old-lady smell. The sweetish scent of talc and dust and mice droppings.

Not one of the city's finer establishments, he realised, and probably more than a few steps down from the ubiquitous and invariably ugly motel rooms he'd become accustomed to over the years. He wasn't sure how he'd failed to notice the shortcomings before.

"How'd you find me?" he asked, focussing his gaze back on her. She was still dressed in the singlet and jeans from the bar, the loose spill of her hair and make-up disorienting against the room's shabbiness and under the dim lighting.

Pulling her phone from her jacket pocket, Ellie waggled it at him as if it was an explanation. "Not so hard when you carry around one of these. I have my sources," she told him, putting it back as she stopped in the middle of the room and turned back to him. "I saw the Impala out the back. Did you follow for long? I lost sight of you after the bridge."

"I thought you were in trouble," Dean said, hearing the faint edge of accusation in his voice as he closed the door and leaned back against it.

She gave him a small shrug, her gaze steady on his. "Yeah, sorry about that. The guy I was with – he's – well, he's a little jumpy. His wife was killed last month in Soho. The police couldn't help him, and he found my name. But he thinks he's clutching at straws. I didn't want to make him more spooked about what was going on than he already was."

"Found your name?" Dean's brows lifted as he wondered about all the things he was coming to realise he didn't know about her. She knew a lot about him, he thought, but she wasn't much for volunteering information.

"Friend of a friend." She turned away with a shrug.

"So this–" He waved a hand at her, looking her up and down. "– this is all an act?"

Ellie grinned at him, unoffended.

"This is the way the contact came," she told him, her voice and expression subtly morphing back to the arrogant look he'd seen at the bar. "I went to school in Boston, it's not much of an act."

Letting the backpack slide off her arm to the floor, she glanced around the room again, her expression and voice returning to normal. "What're you doing here, Dean?"

"Hunting crocottas." He walked across the room for his glass. Hunters got jobs in every kind of way. He didn't remember her mentioning anything about the East Coast, though. "You think your … uh – job's – wife met one?"

She nodded. "I'm sure of it. I've been here four weeks now, and I'm pretty certain there were at least six of them working Manhattan."

"Six?" Dean stopped dead. "They don't hunt in packs. Do they?"

"No," Ellie said, a small crease centring between her brows. "They seem to be hunting as individuals. They don't need or like others of their kind around. But apparently New York is the place to be for them. Millions of victims, lots of hiding places, not a lot of community feeling." She moved to the chair, sitting down, her eyes narrowing. "But you already figured on more of them, didn't you?"

He glanced down at the glass on the nightstand. "Killed one tonight, in the park. Came back here and there's two more deaths on the news." He frowned. "You said 'were'?"

"Got another glass?"

Dean found the second glass on the counter and poured some whiskey into it, handing it to her before he returned to the bed.

"Where's Sam?" Ellie sipped her whiskey.

"We're … uh … taking a vacation, from each other," he said, sitting down. It was one way of describing it.

"Why?" She looked at him directly. His gaze dropped to the floor, mouth twisting into a reluctant and rueful smile at the question. She often asked him hard-to-answer, too-direct questions, and he was often surprised into answering them honestly. But he didn't think he could talk about it this time. What Sam had done. How he'd felt about it … it was a wound that was too deep, too fresh, to let out.

"Uh, just thought it was time we, uh, went our own ways for a while." Not quite the truth, but close enough, he thought, meeting her eyes uncomfortably.

Ellie inclined her head. "That sounds … sensible. Not like you guys to go for the sensible plan." She gave him a half-smile to take any sting out of the comment.

"Yeah. Well, first time for everything," he agreed noncommittally, looking away.

"So, how are you doing?"

He shrugged, swirling the amber liquid around in his glass as he thought about it. "I'm good. I'm not chewed out every day by worry. I'm, uh, happy."

Ellie raised an eyebrow. "Really?"

The corner of his mouth lifted as he acknowledged her doubt. "Yeah, really."

"Well, I'll drink to that." She lifted her glass to him and swallowed a mouthful.

He tipped his glass and drank, looking at her over it.

He was good. It had surprised him, when he'd first recognised it, but it was true. Hunting on his own, away from the whole angel/demon power struggle, it was like the old days. Hunting without Sam meant that he could concentrate on what he was doing, could get the job done without that background edge of worry about his brother, without the need to even think of anyone else. His memories hadn't disappeared but they'd been lessened, somehow, when he didn't have to hide them all the time.

His gaze slid absently to the long, graceful curve of her throat when she tipped the glass back, a slight jolt hitting his nervous system as he wondered vaguely if the skin there was as smooth as it looked. He looked away, taking a deep breath.

"So. Do we team up for these crocottas or handle half each on our own?" he asked, his head ducking to hide his surprise at the randomness of the question, coming out of nowhere.

Ellie finished her whiskey and turned to look consideringly at him. "I thought you were happy working alone?"

"I am. But six of them …" He looked down into his glass. "I wouldn't say no to some help."

She laughed. "Yeah, well, I wouldn't either," she admitted, the laughter fading to a smile. He felt that jolt again. The smile was one he'd been wanting to see again for a while.

Getting to her feet, she carried the glass to the counter and rinsed it out, setting it on the drainer. "Sam killed Lilith, didn't he?"

"Yeah, she was the last seal."

"How was he building his strength?"

He didn't want to admit to it, not even now, not even to her. She could find out from someone, the thought crossed his mind a second later. If she really wanted to know.

"He was drinking demon blood."

Said out loud, like that, no excuses, made it worse, he found.

"Ruby's?"

"Mostly," he said. "Sometimes others."

To his surprise, she didn't seem to find it abhorrent or disgusting. Her expression, under the murky overhead light, was thoughtful.

"You don't seem all that shocked."

Ellie lifted her gaze back to him. "I told you, Dean, there were some ways to … to take shortcuts with the strengthening of mental power," she said, folding her arms over her chest. "I just didn't think that he'd use that one."

Dean snorted without amusement. "No, didn't occur to me either, till I saw it."

"Are you alright?"

He looked away. "No," he said. "About that? No."

"Lucifer's out now, looking for a vessel," she said, her voice becoming matter-of-fact. "Sam's his vessel, you know."

"Yeah, I heard that."

"And you're Michael's."

He couldn't help the involuntary look he gave her, astonished that she knew that part, closing his mouth on the next obvious question. He sounded like a broken record every time he asked it.

She shook her head at him. "I take it the angels still aren't telling you anything?"

"He – they said I'd be the one to stop it."

Her mouth compressed as her gaze cut away. "The bloodlines of the Winchesters and Campbells. Descended from Araquiel and Azazel. A trillion-to-one-shot that those lines would ever join. Much worse odds that they'd produce men strong enough."

"What are you talking about?" he asked, a shiver trickling up his spine. He knew what she was talking about, he thought disorientedly. A flicker of dizziness at the unexpected familiarity of it made him sway slightly.

"Whatever's going on up there, it's been going on for a long time."

Dean reached for the bottle, pouring himself another shot and getting up. He crossed the space between them, setting his glass as he picked hers up and poured another shot into it. She took it without looking at it, or at him, her eyes unfocussed.

"You heard about Bobby?"

Ellie looked up at him, the crease back between her brows. "I haven't been able to reach Bobby for weeks."

Dean let out his breath, leaning beside her against the counter and setting the bottle down. "He was possessed," he said, staring at the other side of the room. "They were trying to find something and he – he stabbed himself to stop them from killing me."

"Oh … Bobby …" Ellie said, her glass hitting the counter with a thump. "Well, that explains–what were they trying to find?"

"The sword of Michael."

He felt her gaze shift to him, and turned his head to meet her eyes as she asked, "You?"

"Yeah. Me."

"They'll hunt you no matter where you go," she said, and he felt another trickle of ice slip down his neck. She made those jumps effortlessly, he thought, lifting his glass.

"Yeah, well, they'll have to find me first," he said, sucking down a breath and tossing the shot in his glass back. "And I got a job to do."

The bravado in his voice was for her, he admitted to himself, walking back to the bed and dropping onto it. Zachariah hadn't pulled any punches in showing him how far the angels would go to get his consent.

"You said there were six, you thought," he said to change the subject, waving a hand at the TV on the dresser, not wanting to think about the things he'd been so successful in not thinking about the last couple of weeks. What the angels wanted. What the demons wanted. What his brother was doing. "You seen 'em?"

Ellie glanced at the muted television, nodding. "When I got here, there were a couple of attacks per week, in the park, in Soho and in Harlem. I got the two who working those areas, but the park's too big to cover alone."

She looked down at the whiskey in her glass, swallowing the last mouthful and twisting around to put it into the sink. "There's a diner down on the corner, I'll meet you there at seven?"

"What?" He stared blankly at her.

"Got find myself some digs," she explained, walking over to her bag. "I was staying down at the West Village, but that's – well, it's not available now."

"You're not going to find a room now," he told her, glancing at his watch.

"Oh, I'll find something," she assured him as she headed for the door.

"Ellie." Dean got to his feet. "Wait a sec."

She stopped, glancing back at him over her shoulder and waiting. He had the uncomfortable feeling she knew what he was going to say before he'd even thought of saying it, and he swallowed nervously.

"I – uh – I thought –" he stumbled over the words, looking around the room. "You been busy?"

There was a flash of amusement in her eyes, he thought, looking at her as she ducked her head to hide it. She always knew when he was full of shit.

"Yeah, you could say that," she said, her tone light. "But the reason I didn't get in touch was that I figured you didn't want any help."

He frowned at that. "C'mon, that's not – we called you last time," he told her defensively.

"You know I'm not talking about that," she said, her gaze swivelling back at the door.

"Stay here."

The words – the invitation – came out before he could stop it and he stared at her, feeling as bewildered as she looked.

"I mean, you know, not, uh, just … you can have the bed," he hurried to clarify what he'd said, waving an arm around the room in a diversionary gesture. "If we're working together on this, it'll be easier …"

He trailed off, not sure of what he meant, a glance at his watch showing it was nearly half past two in the morning. "Why waste more cash on another room?" he offered, knowing it was a hopelessly lame excuse, unable to think of anything better.

Ellie turned back toward him, her expression cautious, he thought.

"What's going on?" she asked and he shook his head.

"Nothin', just, you know …" he hedged, trying to think of anything that might sound compelling, unsure of why it was important. "It's, uh, not great but better than trying to work with me here and you somewhere blocks away."

That did sound somewhat better, he decided. There was no chance of her being able to get a room in the same hotel; his'd been the last vacancy, the manager'd told him when he'd signed in, like it was a big deal. That meant somewhere further away. Harder to bounce ideas off each other if the other wasn't around.

He still didn't know what had prompted the offer and he wasn't sure he wanted to investigate it any more closely. For some reason, it just seemed important to stick together on this case.

"Alright," she said, looking at the sofa. "I'll take that."

"Good," he said, his breath huffing out in a long exhale. The sense of relief was as disproportionate to the situation as his offer'd been. He shoved that thought away unlooked-at as well.

"We'll see how it goes," she added, shifting her bag on her shoulder.

"What?" He looked at her. "You don't trust me?"

"Trust isn't the issue," she said, her voice dry. Wiping a hand along her cheek, she grimaced, and turned around, looking for the bathroom door. "Nothing like this city for grime," she threw over her shoulder, heading for it.

He watched her walk into the bathroom, the door closing behind her, and immediately found himself on edge. What the hell had he been thinking, asking her to stay with him?

The answer hovered, just past the perimeter of conscious thought, and he deliberately ignored it, not in the mood for self-analysis. They were going to work together. She was a capable hunter and the odds would be a lot more in their favour pooling their skills and knowledge and resources than each trying to take on the crocottas on their own.

He looked around the room again, noticing the empty paper bag lying on the floor, his duffel open, last week's bloody and dirt-encrusted clothing hanging out of it. He walked over to the side of the bed, picking up the paper bag, and shoving the clothes back into the depths of the duffle before he zipped it closed and pushed it under the bed with his foot.

So, maybe sharing a room with her wasn't such a hot idea. He wasn't used to having anyone around but Sam. Sure as hell wasn't used to living with a woman. The way she'd looked at the bar slipped involuntarily into his head; the scooped singlet hugging the curves of her breasts and taut over the flatness of her stomach, her soft old denim jeans showing the length and curves of her legs.

He took a deep breath and scanned the room again, focussing on the crappy furniture to banish the image. He'd just have to live with it. He'd made too big a deal of it to withdraw the invitation now.

The pipes banged a little and he heard the tap running behind the closed bathroom door, the squeak of the shower taps. Walking slowly back to the counter in the alcove, he picked up the bottle and poured himself a fresh double and returned to the TV set, turning the volume up a little when he saw the latest news broadcast playing. He returned to the bed and settled himself at the head, leaning back against the thin heap of pillows and forcing himself to concentrate on the screen.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

* * *

In the shabby bathroom, with its exposed pipes, peeling paint and missing tiles, Ellie dropped her pack on a narrow cupboard beside the pedestal sink and opened it, pulling out the long, shapeless tee shirt she used to sleep in from time to time. She left the shirt on the top of her pack and lifted her head, turning to look at her reflection in the fly-spotted and delaminating mirror.

She looked different. That recognition was immediate and surprising. Older and yet younger, the freckles and scars hidden, her eyes and mouth too vivid. She didn't habitually wear makeup and although the application had been light, between it and the pollution and humidity in the city, it felt heavy on her face. Turning on the tap, she took a hairband from her pack and pulled her hair back, picking up the soap and bending to wash it all off.

_Such a bad idea_.

No argument, she thought as she scrubbed at her skin. Aside from the fact that too much had happened in the last few months and their old working relationship had practically gone, she was used to working alone, grimacing at the thought of the next few days. Used to _being_ alone, for much of the time, not having to guard her thoughts or expressions from anyone else.

Rinsing the soap off, she wiped her hands over her face and looked up, the image looking back once again familiar. There was a single towel in the room, hanging from the back of the door and Ellie reached for it, burying her face in it and only registering the faint scent of the man who'd used it, still clinging to the fabric and filling her senses, when it surrounded her.

_Don't even think about it_, she warned herself, returning the towel to the hook. _This is a job. The last thing you need is complications_.

It was good advice. She'd told him the truth, not the whole truth, but as much as she'd been able. After Long Beach, she'd thought he was wrestling with too much on his own and she'd watched him pick and choose what he felt he could say and what he couldn't. Snorting softly at herself as she pulled off the tight singlet and unbuttoned and slid her jeans down to the floor, she knew it was about as much as she'd picked and chosen what she could tell him.

Over the last month, there'd been a sudden stop to the flow of information she'd been able to access and while it'd felt like the quiet before a storm, she hadn't found a single direction she could follow to get a lead on what was happening. The angels and demons had, it seemed, finally learned the meaning of 'loose lips sink ships' and both planes had been buttoned down. That alone should've raised her internal alarms, but she hadn't been in contact with any of the hunters who knew the Winchesters over the past few weeks, and at the time, that hadn't worried her particularly. It wasn't a close-knit community at the best of times, although Bobby's continual absence had begun to worry her.

Pulling the hair band free, she stripped off her underwear and thought of what Dean'd said about the older hunter. She would have to find the time to get to Sioux Falls and check in with him. Maybe after this gig.

The pipes banged and the tap let out a little shriek as she turned on the shower, not waiting for the water to heat up before stepping under it.

There'd been no time for another trip to Egypt and a couple of difficult hunts had occupied her enough so she hadn't noticed the signs that should've been obvious. Would've been obvious if she'd been looking at everything objectively, she corrected herself with a sigh. If she hadn't wanted to stay away from him and let the effects of their conversation in Nebraska soften with time. Nothing he'd said should've had the impact it had, she knew, picking up the bar of soap and lathering herself with it. None of it had been untrue, or unjustified. She hadn't wanted to tell him about the seal. Hadn't wanted to see his shock and pain. Hadn't wanted to be the one to deliver that blow. Hadn't wanted to do it because she'd known what his reaction would have been.

The water reached blood temperature and she closed her eyes, tipping her head back into the rush.

He would've withdrawn. Would've been angry. Then devastated. Then gone. He wouldn't've listened to her and wouldn't've accepted sympathy or understanding or any kind of comfort. And when it'd come right down to it, that moment when she could've made him listen, she couldn't do it.

Flipping the shower off, Ellie stood for a moment in the tub, pushing the thick plastic curtain aside and staring at the bathroom blankly.

It didn't make a difference. She'd only discovered that there'd been more to Hell's prophecy after Sam had killed Lilith. _And it is written, that the first Demon shall be the last Seal_.

She reached for her pack, dripping water on the floor and over her things as she rummaged for a towel. Pulling it out, she dried herself, the events of the last three weeks still bright and vivid.

Bela's document hadn't included part of the prophecy. Patrick had called from Rome only a week ago. And she'd already known that it was too late. The devil was apparently free and on this plane.

Picking up the over-long tee and dragging it over her head, she wondered what could've happened between the brothers that Dean seemed comfortable on his own, and not, as he'd put it, chewed up with worry over Sam.

He'd hesitated as he'd said it, she remembered. Had been holding back on some part that he didn't want to talk about. Sam's number had been changed again. She'd tried calling him after the news report in Ilchester, calling to see if they knew anything about the phenomena that had terrified the residents of Maryland and confounded the scientific sector. Of course, since then, there'd been more and more reports of natural disasters, none of them looking particularly natural. Ray had been tracking most and had come up with nothing so far. Out of season, out of normal regions, but not accompanied by the massive electro-magnetic fluctuations that demonkind seemed to generate as a matter of course when meddling with the natural world.

Rubbing the towel over her hair, she took a brush from the pack and brushed through the long, fine lengths, the static in the humid air crackling in the rapidly-drying strands. Her fingers automatically divided it into three sections and began to braid it into the habitual long plait that kept it out of her way, subduing the charge as her gaze moved inattentively over the sink's curved porcelain edges.

The zipped leather bag that lay on the right side of the sink was scuffed, large enough to hold bathroom necessities. As she finished the braid and wrapped the band around the end, she reached for her pack, pulling out a similar bag and setting it on the other side of the sink. The sight sent an odd shiver down her back, not of dread or concern, but a disorienting impact, as if she'd just done something that would change the future.

_Cut it out_.

Opening the zipper and pulling out her toothbrush and toothpaste, she glanced up at her reflection. _Anyone would think you're going soft_.

_Lucifer's loose, looking for a vessel. Looking for Sam_, she reminded herself and that thought wiped away the others. _And Michael would be looking for Dean_. She didn't really think either man would be able to avoid the angels' notice for long, no matter how they were protecting themselves.

Turning the tap on again, she loaded the brush with paste and leaned over, brushing and spitting as her thoughts churned around the man in the next room.

The attempt he'd made at an explanation had been for Nebraska, she knew. She didn't know why he'd asked her to join him, either on the hunt, or in this room. There was no question that it would make it easier, more efficient to hunt together, but … she spat out the final mouthful of water and looked at herself in the mirror … it was going to make it so much harder too.

Rinsing the brush out, she left it on the sink top next to the toothpaste. _Worry about it when it happens_, she told herself firmly. If they could find the crocottas wherever it was they were hiding, or even while they were stalking their victims in the park after dark, they wouldn't have to deal with the situation too long.

She picked up the pack and turned for the door, opening it and turning off the light as she came out. Dean lay on the bed, apparently riveted by an infomercial that promised wealth, love and happiness if the viewer just bought this one product. She dropped her bag at the foot of the sofa and looked around the room for the closet that would hold spare linen.

"Where do you want to start? Tomorrow?" he asked her as she crossed the room. "The last crocotta we saw had a job."

Ellie nodded, opening the closet door and pulling out a spare pillow, sheet and thin quilt.

"The one in Soho was working for a funeral home," she told him, stacking the linen on one arm of the sofa and making it up. The day's temperatures hadn't really cooled and the room was warm. She'd probably toss most of it off, she thought. "I was thinking about the hotels around the park."

She glanced over her shoulder when he didn't respond. He was staring at the TV, his expression focussed.

"How would we find them?"

"Not sure on that yet," she admitted, sitting down on the sofa and dragging her pack toward her to pull out her notebook.

"You keep a journal?" he asked, looking curiously at the leather-bound lined book.

She looked up and smiled, a little deprecatingly. "It was one of the first things I got drummed into me," she told him, looking down at the pages. "Keep a record."

He looked away and Ellie glanced back at him, seeing his attention had returned to the TV. His father had kept a journal, she knew. So did Bobby and Rufus. All the older hunters did. Ellen'd had several, her own and Bill's, maybe gone now, after the fire. In her apartment, there were ten notebooks like the one she held, detailing everything she'd come across since she'd begun. The first couple were more like diaries. In the storage unit in Nevada, there were three cartons of notebooks that'd belonged to her first partner.

Staring down at her notes, she listened to the muted sound of the television, to Dean's breathing, the faint rustles he made as he shifted his position. She was too aware of him, lying there. She caught the inside of her lip between her teeth and tried to force her attention on the words on the page in front of her, shut out all the distractions. After she'd read the same paragraph three times and absorbed nothing from it, she reluctantly acknowledged that this was going to be harder than she'd thought.

"Question?"

"Mmm?" She lifted her head to look at Dean, giving up on the pretence that she was busy. "Yeah?"

"You said that hunting hadn't made what happened … to your family … any better, hadn't fixed anything."

"Mmm-hmm."

"Why do you keep hunting?" he asked. "There are a lot of things you'd be good at, good enough to earn a living, live well."

Looking back down at the notebook, Ellie wondered how to answer him. It wasn't that cut and dried. There had been a lot of things she'd given up to do this. But it hadn't felt like a sacrifice.

"Sit in an office all day?" she asked him, shaking her head. "I like this life, in a lot of ways. I can't go and find a nine-to-five life now. I don't want to work for an intelligence agency, not that any self-respecting one would have me, or do the armed forces thing, and nothing else would give me the satisfaction of using both the mental and physical skills that hunting does."

He turned back to the screen, brows pulled together. "But you're cut off, from regular life, from regular people. Doesn't that … bug you?"

"Sometimes. I usually find irregular people more interesting," she said, the corner of her mouth tucking in. "Does it bother you?"

"Yeah it does. Sometimes." He shrugged. "Okay, not all the time."

"Maybe there is no other choice, once you've done something like this for a long time. A lot of soldiers don't fit back into civilian life either. It doesn't worry me. At least I'm doing something that means something, even if only to a few people. I'm not pushing paper or data around in a meaningless round. And, for the most part, I like the people in this life." She glanced at him curiously. "Do you want a different life, Dean? A regular job, a wife, and kids, and the white picket fence?"

He turned back to her, his eyes narrowing a little as if he was trying to work out what she thought of those things.

"I don't know. That's now. What I really want is to have had that for my family when I was growing up." He shook his head, his mouth twisting. "Sometimes I wish everything was different. That what happened to us, to Mom, to Sam, had never happened, we all got live normal lives."

"Oh, that," she said, remembering the conversation in Michigan. "Yeah, well, we all want that."

She dropped her gaze back to her notes, the edge of the journal sitting under the plans. They were part of an accumulation of years of hunting. He had the same knowledge, filed away in his mind; years of experience, of understanding. Did either of them really want to pretend that never happened, that they'd grown up never knowing about the flip side? If he hadn't been a hunter, if his father hadn't, she wouldn't be alive right now.

"We wouldn't be the same people, Dean." Lifting her head, she kept her expression carefully neutral. "Who would you be now if your life hadn't made that sudden left turn?"

His eyes cut away abruptly and she wondered if he was thinking of the wish he'd made, the one he'd never told anyone about, not even himself.

"Maybe, for you, it would have been better."

"Not for you?" He raised his brows disbelievingly, visibly shaking off the uncertainties she could see in his face. "You like this way of living?"

"I like who I am because of it," she told him, tired suddenly of the conversation. It was a specious argument, those 'what ifs'. It was what it was. "I like what I do, yeah."

Looking down at the notebook, she added, "I might have found something useful to do, if everything had gone along as expected. But I might not – I might have been stuck in a safe life, feeling different, wanting something else."

His silence dragged her gaze back to him and she saw a twitch in his face, there and gone.

"I don't think I'd have felt that way, not if I'd grown up without hunting," he said, and Ellie was instantly certain that was a lie, but not to her. For whatever reason, it was a lie to himself. In Michigan, he'd said that the wish had been his life, if nothing had happened. She wondered what the djinn had shown him, about himself, in that life.

"Maybe not. Or maybe you'd have gone into some other profession where saving people is a part of the job." She could imagine him doing a lot of things, doing them well. "That could just be a part of you, Dean."

Watching him shift his position against the head of the bed and turn away uncomfortably, Ellie sighed inwardly. He didn't like people noticing those sorts of things about him.

She wondered if he really could settle down to a normal life, a life where the biggest worry would be what colour to paint the house, or whether the roof needed to be fixed before the next winter storm. Maybe he could.

Leaning back, she stretched out her legs, propping her feet on the low table. "I hope you find what you want, Dean."

He didn't respond and she let the silence grow, the low background chatter of the TV barely audible.

"What do you want?" he asked several minutes later, and she glanced up at him in surprise, wondering a little guiltily if the question had been prompted by something he'd seen in her expression. His attention was still on the flickering screen and she let out her breath in a small huff of relief as she considered her answer.

"I want to do something that I'm good at and that means something to me," she said. "I want to do my job."

"Even if it kills you?"

"I could get hit by a bus tomorrow," she pointed out.

He didn't seem to have a response to that and Ellie glanced up from under her lashes, studying his profile in the flickering white light from the television. She wondered if the answer had satisfied him.

For the next few minutes, her notebook's neat handwriting remained unintelligible but as the TV's inane murmur faded into a distant drone, she began to concentrate on her notes.

The mythology of the creatures they were hunting was world-wide; every culture had them. What they were called, and their habits, differed, from country to country, sometimes a lot but often not much. Their methods, what they took or how to kill them remained consistent.

She drew her legs up, resting the journal against her knees and read back over what she'd found about the two she'd managed to find and kill. Both bodies had cracked and crumbled into dust with the first light. Picking up her pen, she underlined that. She'd never seen one in daylight. Under the flat white fluorescent lighting of the funeral home, yes. But not in the full spectrum of sunlight. Skimming backwards through the rest of her notes, she made a note as she realised that there were no anecdotal accounts of anyone seeing them during the daylight hours.

* * *

When she looked up again it was just past three, and Dean was asleep, the television still droning, its pale, changing light playing over his face. She closed the notebook and tucked it back into her bag, straightening and stretching as she stood up.

She turned off the television and walked over to the bed, carefully disengaging his fingers from the glass he still held and setting it safely on the nightstand. Looking down at him, she caught her lower lip between her teeth as she realised he was still fully dressed. _Surely, it couldn't be comfortable to sleep in your boots?_

"Dean?"

He remained silent and still, eyes closed, his chest rising and falling steadily.

Moving to the end of the bed, she reached out tentatively, tugging on the ends of the lacing. He didn't move and the laces slid free of the knots without a fuss. She slid her fingers under the loops, working up the boot until they were very loose and eased them off. His jeans and shirt didn't look all that comfortable to sleep in either but she wasn't going to undress him.

She walked back to the sofa and laid down, drawing the loose end of the cover over her shoulder as she rolled onto her side and tucked her arm beneath the pillow. It had been a long, weird day and she was ready for it end. Her decision to stay here, to hunt with him, still rankled slightly. She preferred to hunt alone, to not have responsibility for anyone else but herself. She knew why she'd agreed, but she wondered if it wasn't going to be something she was going to regret.

* * *

Dean opened one eye slightly as he heard her settle on the sofa. He lay still, listening to her breathe, catching the faint scent of her in the still air of the room. It wasn't one of his best ideas, asking her to stay, he thought restlessly.

When she'd come out of the bathroom, face scrubbed and hair pulled back, looking more familiar, he'd been relieved. The tee shirt came down to her knees and it was loose, hiding the curves he couldn't quite make himself forget about, and he'd told himself that they were just hunters, collaborating on a case.

It wasn't just the unsettling unfamiliarity of having her in the room, the light on the nightstand turning her hair to flame as she bowed her head over her notes. It wasn't just the persistence of the faint scent of her in the still, warm air of the room, or the strange and disturbingly potent little image of her toothbrush lying on the sink next to his – an image that'd invaded his thoughts and had taken some effort to push away – as disquieting as all those things were.

It was the fact that he'd had to clamp his teeth together more than once to stop himself from asking her things, telling her things, things that he wouldn't've – couldn't've – told his brother or anyone else about, things that he'd thought were buried and gone but which kept rising and turning over and seeping into his thoughts or dreams, day or night.

All his life, he'd thought he'd kept his own counsel, a habit inculcated deeply by his father's rule – _we do what we do and we shut up about it_ – but also by the responsibility he felt, had lived by. He'd had his family and it hadn't felt like he'd needed too many others. It hadn't been until he'd tried to let Cassie in, deliberately, that he'd known he needed more, wanted more … but that had blown up in his face and left scars that even now ached, from time to time.

Looking back, he realised that he'd had people around, at least until his father had died, people he'd trusted, people he'd been able to talk to. Jim had been one. Caleb, another. Then, faster than he'd been able to deal with, there'd been just Sam and Bobby. And talking to his brother had become difficult. And dangerous. And as much as he knew Bobby was there, there were some things he couldn't talk over with the older man, some things that he couldn't face letting out. It felt … disloyal … to talk to him about Sam. Felt as if he were skinless when he'd thought about trying to talk to Bobby about his brother's choice.

Waiting for the demons in North Dakota, he'd let some of those things out, unintentionally for the most part, the unbearable tension loosening in the darkness, her voice quiet, calming, her light touch an anchor in the middle of chaos and doubt. In the house in Michigan, it'd been the same. He'd waited, for those conversations to come back on him, to bite him somewhere down the track but they never had.

Rolling over silently on the bed, he stared at her outline, under the thin cover, clear enough in the ambient light of the city that came through the high, bare windows.

She'd kept his secrets.

* * *

The morning light cascaded through the windows, filling the room, and Dean rolled over, one arm flung across his face, trying to hold on to sleep a bit longer, trying to hold onto the last slivers of a dream that hadn't been about blood and death and pain.

He heard the burr of a chair being pushed back, then the click of the kettle on the counter, clinking as a spoon hit a cup. Lying still, his eyes slitted against the light that penetrated the shadow of his arm.

He could smell coffee; not the good, fresh kind but instant, from the hotel supplies. Still, coffee was coffee, especially first thing in the morning. He heard the kettle muttering to itself, and the slight rustle of paper from the direction of the small table on the other side of the room, a faint tap-tap of a pen against it.

He wanted to get up, get some caffeine flowing through his system but he'd have to wait a bit longer, lying curled on his side. This was not a problem when he had a room to himself, he thought with a vague annoyance. On the other hand, it didn't often happen when he had a room to himself. The dream had been incomprehensible, more feeling than thought, but better than the nightmares he usually had. The image of a pair of jade-green eyes lingered behind his mostly-closed lids.

The kettle clicked itself off as the water boiled and he heard Ellie get up, the liquid slosh of a cup being filled, the scent of the instant coffee stronger.

"Black?"

He nodded, opening an eye as she brought the cup over to the bed and set it on the nightstand. He reached for it, the discomfort of sleeping in his clothes momentarily overridden by the prospect of something to help him wake.

"What time did you get up?" he asked, grimacing slightly as he swallowed a mouthful of the bitter brew.

"Early," she said, returning to the table. "Doesn't matter, I don't need a lot of sleep."

Looking up at the tall windows behind him, he realised that their angle meant the sun would've been pouring in since dawn. He liked more sleep. He didn't get enough usually. Maybe a couple of blankets over the windows would let them both get that bit more.

The distension in his jeans was no longer so noticeable, or uncomfortable, and he eased himself up the bed, forcing himself to swallow another mouthful of the coffee.

"Breakfast?" he asked, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed.

Ellie looked up from the map she was studying and nodded. "Sounds good. That coffee is awful."

He watched her straighten up, gathering her notes and the map and putting them into her pack. In the clear, pitiless light that filled the room, her skin was bare, the pale amber freckles just visible in their smattering over cheeks and nose. The sunlight lit up her hair, drawn back from her face and held firmly in a long braid down her back. The long tee had been replaced by a thin, sleeveless blouse and jeans, and she wore the same light sandals he'd seen the previous night instead of her usual boots, in deference to the heat, he guessed, that was already starting to infiltrate the building.

Grabbing his bag from under the bed, he walked to the bathroom. The clothes he was wearing still held a slightly sour aroma of sweat from the previous evening's exertions and while he'd have ignored it if he'd been on his own, it kept catching his attention with someone else around.

* * *

The diner was on the corner, small and crowded, the smells intoxicatingly appetising as they came through the door. A tired-looking waitress waved her hand in the direction of an empty booth as she carried four loaded plates across the room, weaving in and out of the tables.

"Be with you in just a minute," she said over her shoulder, hurrying away.

The booth hadn't been cleared and they moved the debris of the previous breakfast to the end of the table, Ellie grabbing a handful of serviettes from the dispenser to wipe off the coffee and ketchup spills before she pulled out a map of the city and spread it over the surface.

"Look at this," she said, pointing to the red crosses she'd marked earlier. The crosses showed the big hotels that surrounded the park. "All the vics were from out of town, the ones who got hit in Central Park," she continued, glancing up at him. "I don't think that was random."

He stared at the map, turning over the possibilities in his mind. Hotel staff were unnoticeable, especially in the big ones, where there were hundreds of staff, all in uniforms.

"They'd know the details of these people, know how long they were staying for, who wouldn't be missed if they didn't show up later," Ellie told him, her gaze dropping back to the map.

"They're not hiding the bodies," he said, frowning a little. "Most of these people are found the same night, or the next day."

"Why bother?" Ellie looked up. "They're visitors. The park's known for muggings and assault."

"But how're they getting them out there?" he asked, leaning over the table. "Maybe they're using the hotel phones?"

"That shouldn't be too hard to check–"

"What can I get you?"

Dean leaned back as the waitress materialised beside him, a pencil and pad in her hands, her expression slightly harried.

"Uh, the special and coffee, black," he told her, glancing at the chalkboard. "Extra bacon."

"Sure." She turned to look at Ellie.

"Same, please," Ellie said, looking back at the map.

"Sure, hon," the waitress said, scribbling as she about-faced and walked away.

"The same?"

Ellie looked up at Dean. "What?"

"Nothing," he said. "So, uh, front desk, you think?"

"Could be anyone," she said. "They can pick up memories easily. People who are grieving, or feeling any strong emotion about someone would be standing out like neon to them."

"We can't go stab them in the spine when they're not ganking someone," Dean pointed out doubtfully. "We still have to wait till they get to the park."

"Not if they have another vulnerability that we can check," Ellie said.

"Like –?"

He looked around as Ellie turned her head, moving the map back as the waitress approached with loaded plates, cups and a pot of coffee.

"Here you go, hon," she said, unloading plate, cutlery and cup in front of him, turning to do the same for Ellie, the coffee pot releasing a pungent waft as she filled their cups. "Refills are free, call when you're ready."

Dean nodded, barely hearing her, his brain hijacked by the sight and smells rising from his plate. Eggs, glistening and golden and firm, bacon, crispy and a small mound of it, curling along the edges, sausage, browned and gleaming, a pile of thin, translucently golden onions heaped over them, hash browns the deep amber of clear toffee, crunching slightly as he picked up his knife and fork and pushed the knife through the thin crust.

Heaven, he thought, saliva filling his mouth as he stared down. The real heaven, not some dick-riddled, pie-in-the-sky alternative. He reached for the salt and ketchup, spreading both liberally over his food, and sighed as the first forkful hit his tongue, eyes closing slowly.

On the other side of the table, Ellie looked at him in amusement. "You're not hard to please, are you?"

His mouth was full, and he satisfied the need for rebuttal by waving an eggy fork at her plate. She looked down and smiled ruefully.

"Yeah, okay, no more throwing stones," she allowed, picking up her cutlery.

When he'd swallowed the mouthful, he asked, "What other vulnerability?"

Ellie chewed and swallowed before answering. "The bodies always turn to dust in sunlight, right?"

His brows drew together. He should've thought of that, not that it was going to make it much easier to test possibilities. "So, short of shoving them out a door or window, or, uh, into the hotel's tanning salon, how're we supposed to check that?"

"Well," Ellie said, loading her fork again. "It's going to depend on what part of the visible light spectrum does the damage, but we could start with UV and work our through from there."

His fork remained suspended above his plate as he saw the smile that lit her up. It didn't last all that long, that smile, but it was always worth the wait. Ducking his head when he realised he'd been looking too long, he found himself wondering what she'd come up with to test possible crocottas for an aversion to sunshine, or at least some part of it. He was wiping his plate with the last of the toast when it occurred to him that, for the first time in a long time, he was actually looking forward to this hunt.

* * *

On the corner opposite the diner, a public phone booth still had a mostly-intact copy of the Manhattan phone book and Dean crowded in behind Ellie as she lifted it onto the narrow counter in the booth and opened it.

It was a mistake, he realised as soon as he got close enough to read over her shoulder. The city's heat had built rapidly while they'd been eating and in the closed glass-paned booth it was almost stifling, concentrating the scent of the woman in front of him and enveloping him in it.

For several seconds, he blanked out, trying to work out what combination of fragrances it was that were making him feel as if he was floating an inch or two above the concrete pavement. Something woodsy, he thought, something that brought back his few memories of being on the shore, tangy and light and somehow fresh like a breeze. He almost had it when Ellie finished writing down the details she'd looked up and tried to back out of the booth, running into him.

"Sorry," she said, twisting around in the narrow space to look up at him.

"My fault," he muttered, his gaze dropping to the ground as he backed awkwardly away from her, fiercely ignoring the disappointment felt as he stepped onto the traffic-scented street again. "So what're we looking for?"

"Lighting specialist," she told him, stepping out beside him and turning to look up and down the street. "There's a place on Houston that will probably have what we need."

"Uh, you wanna take the car?" he asked, looking at the slow-moving crawl of vehicles in front of them.

Ellie shook her head. "Subway."

She pointed at the entrance less than a block away. "You'll never get a park down there."

* * *

The platform had already made it over ninety degrees, Dean estimated as he and Ellie inched their way through the packed, sweating and irritable crowd of commuters toward the edge, feeling the run of sweat down the back of his neck soaking into his tee shirt.

As the train pulled in, there was a heavy gust of much hotter air, acrid-smelling and steamy, through the tunnel and the already-pressed crowd squeezed closer together to let those on the train off as the doors opened.

Pushed along with the surge as the last disembarkees cleared the gap and the leading edge of the crowd on the platform leapt forward to make it on, Dean wrinkled his nose at the press of people around him. The mixed odours of sweat and cologne and perfume, breakfast krollers and donuts, leather and cotton and synthetics combined and overwhelmed even the potently bitter smell of the hot rails and tunnels.

He kept his gaze fixed on the bright hair in front of him, inching forward with the mob, uncomfortably aware they had no control over where they'd end up on the carriage. A garbled, disembodied voice said something over the speakers and he found himself squashed through the doors and propelled to the other side of the carriage, his back hitting a vertical pole as Ellie was shoved against him by a very large man in a charcoal-black suit pushing his way behind her.

The train pulled away with a jerk and he heard her gasp as the weight of the businessman fell onto her, his arm snaking around her waist to keep her from being thrown the other way as the carriage snatched forward again.

The car was cooler, significantly so, and although it didn't make the tight confines any easier, it did cut most of the bodily scents of the passengers back to bearable levels. His sweat cooled on his skin and he lifted his gaze to the metal roof as he realised he had another problem.

Ellie was pressed against him by the guy behind her. She was so close, he could feel every inch from chest to knees through the all-too-thin barrier of their clothing. It wasn't helping that the mingled scents of her hair and skin, intensified by the growing heat of the people crowded into the carriage, was surrounding him, making it impossible to breathe in anything else. The curved metal sheet of the car's ceiling was held together by rivets and he started to count them, hoping to short-circuit any possible reaction before she noticed it.

The train hadn't quite made the next station when there was an ominous thudding bang and the passengers looked up and around uneasily. The problem became apparent quickly and Dean stifled a low groan as he felt the heat slowly rising, the movement of the cooled air from the car's fans stop and dissipate fast.

"Subway?" he muttered peevishly at Ellie, glancing down and looking away as he realised that he didn't need a visual to accompany what he could already feel. "Really?"

"Not usually this bad," she offered apologetically, looking away as the passenger behind her twisted around, his weight grinding her more tightly against Dean.

Neither spoke for the next seven stops. Dean kept his gaze over Ellie's head, reading the subway map, the advertisements, watching a fluorescent light flickering at the end of the carriage.

_Colleagues_, he repeated to himself as the train rolled to one side, and Ellie's hips slid against his. _Hunters, _he grated internally, when the train braked and her breath huffed against his neck, her arms around him for a second before she let go._ Professionals. On a job_. But the images that were flashing through his brain had nothing to do with crocottas or guns and were increasingly difficult to shut out.

When the business man got off at Canal Street, he was reviewing, in the most minute detail he could recall, his top ten list of gruesome cases, in an effort to ignore the way she felt against him. The sudden removal of her body's heat produced a wave of light-headedness and he blinked as she stepped away.

Ellie grabbed the next pole, wiping her brow and the back of her neck, turning away to stare at the darkened windows. Her skin was flushed and Dean could see her pulse, pounding fast in the hollow of her throat.

* * *

They got off at Chambers Street Station and walked back up to Chinatown, even the humid breeze from the river more refreshing than the subway as the mercury rose. He could count on the fingers of one hand the times he'd been here, and he followed Ellie's lead as she cut through alleys and back streets. The lighting manufacturer's building took up half a block and had the look of a Prohibition warehouse; grimy dark brick patterned incongruously with a lighter pattern in some of kind of 20's style.

The manager they spoke to had exactly what she wanted. The flashlight was long and heavy, and took a lot of batteries, but the lenses filtered only a part of the ultraviolet spectrum that most normal lighting didn't, and he smiled at Ellie's smug expression as she slipped it into her bag.

Emerging from the cool of the air-conditioned interior and hitting the solid wall of humid heat on the street, they stopped on the sidewalk and looked at each other. The Canal Street station was only a short walk.

"It's cheaper?" Ellie suggested half-heartedly. "And faster."

"It's crowded and hot," Dean countered, shaking his head vehemently as he saw where she was looking. There was no way in hell he was doing another trip like that.

She shrugged and turned to look down the street.

"Taxi!"

The taxi ride wasn't much of an improvement on the subway, but once they'd crossed over to the East Village, the ride got smoother and faster.

Dean paid the fare, and they walked back to the hotel, picking up sandwiches and drinks on the way.

* * *

Ellie leaned back against the sofa, eyes half-closed as she savoured the tastes exploding over her tongue. The room was hot, and the small, electric fan management had provided did little more than push the heated air around the small space. She was longing for a shower.

"Okay," Dean said from the table, the word a little muffled as it came out around a mouthful of Italian meatball sandwich. "Where do you want to start?"

"The Plaza, I guess," she said, licking her fingers and reaching for her soda. "It's right on the park."

"When?"

"As soon as we're done here," she said, putting the soda down as she looked at her watch. "Afternoon shift'll start at eleven-thirty."

The last of the pastrami, sweet, pickled onions and mustard on rye was swallowed with a moment's regret and she washed it down with the tepid remains of her soda, straightening up on the sofa and looking at him.

"This is still a long shot, you know," she said as she wadded up the bag and serviette and got to her feet. "We'll probably have more luck just staking out the park tonight."

He shrugged. It was a long shot, but it was a good idea all the same. If they could take down some of the monsters with surprise on their side, it would make it easier to deal with what was left. He finished the sub and cleared the table, spreading out the hotel schematics they'd printed off before eating.

"The older hotels, their service areas are like rabbit warrens," Ellie commented, leaning across the table. "If we lose one in there, we're not going to be able to find it."

Leaning on one elbow beside her, Dean turned his head. Her skin was flushed faintly with the heat, one long strand of hair loose from the braid and clinging to the moisture on her neck. The thin, sleeveless blouse was unbuttoned at the throat and he got a sudden and vivid replay of looking down and seeing creamy cleavage framed in that opening, feeling the press of her breasts against his chest. He blinked and looked away. _God, get your shit together_, he told himself with a mental snarl. _It was a job. A case. Hunting things. Saving people. Remember?_

"What about those ones?" he asked, turning his attention back on to the map and pointing at a hotel on the east side of the park.

"A couple of them, yeah," she said, straightening and pushing the errant strand back with the inside of her wrist. From the corner of his eye, he saw the movement lift her breast, outlining her briefly and sending another distracting flush of heat through him. He turned away and walked over to the fridge, pulling out a beer that was barely below room temperature with an internal grimace.

"But the modern ones and the ones that have had a lot of renovations, no, I don't think so."

Glancing back at her as he knocked the top off and lifted the bottle, he saw she was still studying the plans, her expression absorbed. Clearly, his proximity wasn't having the same effect on her as hers was on him.

"Not enough hiding spaces when the interiors were gutted and it was all made open-plan," she added, lifting her gaze to meet his. The sudden eye contact caught him by surprise and he waved his hand at her pack.

"So, we can just walk in and start pointing that thing around at people?"

"More or less," Ellie said. "We'll, uh, try to look like out-of-town guests, but otherwise, yeah. The beam will invisible to the naked eye. If I keep it under something, it should be pretty inconspicuous."

Lifting her pack from the chair, she walked back to the sofa. "You want first shower?"

He shook his head, going to the bed and pulling out his bag, wondering what he had in it that fit the description of an out-of-town guest of a hotel like the Plaza. Not much, he thought uncomfortably. He glanced over his shoulder as he heard the bathroom door close behind her and the taps go on a couple of seconds later.

It had been a bad idea to ask her to stay here, he thought, refusing to acknowledge that he had no intention of changing the arrangement.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

* * *

In the shower, Ellie tipped her head back, letting out a long exhale of relief as the cool water splashed over her and took the heat from her skin and the city's grime from her hair, feeling the tensions of the morning dissolve under the pressure of the shower's spray, and his scent, lingering on her skin and hair and clothes from the moment they'd gotten off the subway, finally washed away.

It wasn't a good idea to work quite this closely, she thought, working shampoo through her hair, and twisting around to rinse it all out. Sooner or later, she would let something slip and she valued their friendship too highly to change it now. On the train, she'd thought it'd been too obvious, the guy behind her had forced her against him so tightly, and she'd discreetly watched his efforts to pretend that having his personal space invaded to such a degree wasn't bugging the living hell out of him.

_Just a job_, she reminded herself firmly, turning the hot completely off and feeling her skin goosebump delightfully as the cold sprayed over her, drowning out recent memories and pushing them aside. Six crocottas, so far as she could tell from the numbers of victims, and just the two of them, so they had to be on the ball.

Turning the taps off, she stepped out of the old-fashioned tub and reached for her towel, drying herself briskly and keeping her thoughts firmly fixed on how they were going to conduct this search through the some of the most expensive and stiff-necked hotels in the world.

Fear and arrogance, she decided, smiling a little at the reference. A little pompous confidence went a long way with most hotel staff.

* * *

Dean turned around as he heard the bathroom door, mouth opening to ask about something, something that vanished without a trace as he blinked in surprise. Ellie emerged from the small bathroom wearing a pair of long, wide-legged black silk pants, the fabric flowing around her legs as she walked, topped with a beaded, black silk top with fine, spaghetti-straps. Her hair was gathered in an artlessly soft roll on the crown of her head, and she was drawing on a thin, cropped jacket in some kind of see-through material as she lifted her head to look at him.

"What?"

"Uh, nothing," he said, damned if he could remember what the hell it was he'd been about to ask.

Turning away, she took out a long, sharp-looking dull metal spike from her pack, feeding it into a narrow sheath along the inside seam of the jacket. She propped her foot on the low table in front of the sofa and slid another fine-bladed knife into the side of her ankle-high black boot, dropping the cuff of the pants over it as she put her foot down.

Glancing at himself in the reflection of the TV's small screen, he decided he'd have to do. The jeans were clean. The shirt, a dark-green, polished cotton button-through, was clean and he hoped the wrinkles would've fallen mostly out by the time they got to the hotel. Not that he cared particularly about wrinkles, he told himself hurriedly, dragging the long, pointed awl from the gear bag and looking at it blankly as he realised he had nowhere to hide the thing. He put it back and pulled out the switchblade instead. The knife went into the front pocket of his jeans. He wasn't getting into a suit, he thought stubbornly, as he looked around at the woman standing at the table.

Ellie glance flicked over him, one brow lifted. "Ready?"

"Yeah," he agreed. Even the lightweight shirt was too warm for the heat of the city, but he didn't have anything else.

* * *

They got a cab to the hotel, and walked into the foyer at noon, both relaxing slightly in the cool, crisp air inside. Dean was silent as they walked through the soaring colonnades, vaulted ceilings, brocade and silk, gilt rimmed panelling and elegantly curved furniture of the hotel's lobby, looking around as casually as possible, trying not to look like some kind of hayseed. Place looked like a palace, he thought, as two bellboys walked past in their livery. Or a really, _really_, up-market bordello.

Ahead of him, Ellie paid no attention to the grand décor, walking briskly across to the event rooms as if she had a meeting and she was almost, but not quite, late. Once clear of the reception foyer, she followed the corridors to the back of the hotel, not even looking around as she hit the swinging doors into the service area.

They worked their way through the network of service corridors, Ellie holding the UV flashlight inconspicuously beneath her folded jacket, its invisible light splashing over each employee they came across. Dean watched, slightly bemused, at the way the staff would look at them, open their mouths to question what they were doing there, then close them abruptly with a closer look at the expression on the face of the woman beside him. Sometimes that expression was a bored condescension, he thought, at others it was a harried look of impatience, and he could see the thoughts of the staff – hotel spy, celebrity handler, higher management – passing over their features as they turned away and attempted to look busier.

Twice they ran into one of the more senior of the hotel's staff. Dean kept his mouth shut as he watched Ellie adopt a foreign accent, wave her hands helplessly in the air, and look confusedly around, interrupting the questions about what they were doing there with high-pitched exclamations of bewilderment. Both times, the staff member gave up on the interrogation and escorted them back to the lobby, assuring them that it 'often happened to guests'. He doubted any guest could've gotten so lost as to end up in the laundry, where the last Guest Attendant had found them, but he kept his expression neutral as Ellie launched into a flood of incomprehensible something-or-other-European at the poor dude and very nearly knocked his pretty gold-braid-adorned hat off as she spun around gesticulating broadly at the corridors they'd come down. His stomach muscles were aching by the time they made it back to the foyer.

"The hell was that you were yelling at him?" he asked, letting his breath out in a strangled snort.

"Uh, just that we were expected and had lost our way," she said distractedly, eyes half-closed in thought.

"In?"

"Russian."

Naturally, he thought with a half-grin at the memory of the guy's face. Who's gonna argue with that?

"What now?" he asked as he followed across the marble floor to the elevators.

"We better get off their radar for a bit," Ellie said in a low voice, stabbing at the Up button.

"No arguments," he said, the grin widening as he looked at her.

"Start at the hotel floors at the top and work our way down?" she asked, stepping into the elevator and flashing the light over the operator as he looked enquiringly at them.

Dean nodded, glancing at the array of buttons. "Eighteen," he said to the pimply-faced young man in livery.

"Of course, sir."

* * *

Two hours later, Dean was starting to feel that the idea really was a long shot. They'd been right through the place, from the Grand Ballroom to the laundries, and so far, nada.

"We should have gotten two of those things," he said, looking down at the jacket over her arm. "At least then we could have split up, done this faster."

"Yeah. It's slow going." Ellie adjusted the fold and swung the flashlight across the walls as they turned the corner.

Ahead of them, a maid was pushing a housekeeping cart slowly along the corridor. Ellie directed the beam to her, sweeping it from feet to head. As it reached the back of her neck, and the exposed skin above her collar, the skin began to crack and crumble. The maid didn't hesitate. She ran, leaving the cart in the middle of the corridor. After a second's surprised hesitation, Dean accelerated after her.

Ellie stopped, frantically running the floor plans of the hotel through her mind. She turned around and ran back the way they'd come, cutting to the left at the service corridor that connected two wings of the guest floors, mentally cursing the swinging jacket, heavy flashlight and the bouncing of her bag on her back as she tried to calculate if she'd be in time to cut them off before they hit the service stairs at the hotel's rear.

* * *

Dean was gaining on the crocotta when they made the last turn toward the stairs, and he pushed harder. It hadn't turned to look back, just rabbited along the wide corridors, dodging the occasional maid or waiter emerging from the guest rooms with a nimble dexterity. Dean couldn't spare any time for explanations, couldn't have thought of any in any case, he raced along after it, hoping that no one was getting a good look at his face as he flashed by them.

Past the crocotta, he could see the void where the stairs were. He felt for his knife, holding the handle concealed in one hand, the blade retracted. If he had to, he could take it out as they went down the stairwell.

* * *

Ellie raced out of the intersecting corridor just in front of the stairs, and aimed the flashlight directly at the crocotta running toward her. The filtered light played down the front of the creature slowly and she watched as it almost exploded into dust, spewing from the empty clothing that dropped into an untidy heap in the middle of the hall. Dean slowed as he came up behind it, looking down at the grey pile of clothing.

"Well," she said, with a touch of satisfaction as she looked up at him. "That worked."

He snorted at the understatement, then looked back over his shoulder. "Yo! Clean up on aisle seven."

* * *

They hit the Sherry-Netherland next, finding another crocotta working in the kitchen there. Dean was buoyant with their success, despite the mileage it took to work their way through the massive hotels.

Ellie looked at the sky as they came out. "We've got time for another one. It won't be sunset until nearly eight thirty."

"The less we have to deal with after dark, the better I like it." Dean looked along the street. "What's the closest?"

She looked at the map, turning it slightly as he came up beside her to look over her shoulder.

"What about that one, the Hudson?"

She frowned. "I don't think so. It's too modern, too hard to hide in." She ran her eye over the streets on the map. "The Pierre A Taj is just down Fifth Avenue. We'll hit that next. We can work the west side tomorrow."

Crossing the street to the tree-lined avenue on the park side to avoid the mass of tourists, shoppers and preeners who filled the opposite pavement, Ellie shifted the flashlight under her jacket to a more comfortable position.

Dean looked at the park as they walked alongside its boundary wall. In the afternoon sunlight, it looked completely serene, a groomed playground for the city. After dark, it wasn't quite as reassuring. Didn't matter, he thought, a frown drawing his brows together as he remembered what was happening outside of this big city. Once the angels and the devil were finished the world, there wouldn't be any quiet places left. Or anyone to want them.

"Did the angels say anything specific about what you're supposed to do, aside from hand yourself over to Michael?" Ellie asked, her voice low.

He turned to look at her, swallowing his surprise at the way she seemed to follow his thoughts.

"Just that I'd end it, only '_not Lilith, or the apocalypse_'," he quoted Zachariah bitterly. "Cas –"

He cut himself off, hesitating at the memory of the angel's words. _What is so worth saving? I see nothing but pain here. I see inside you. I see your guilt, your anger, confusion. In paradise, all is forgiven. You'll be at peace._

"Cas got me to the convent, but too late," he said, shutting away that memory. Maybe there was nothing but pain, he thought.

They both turned to look at the sudden high-pitched laughter of a child, over the low wall separating park from street. A little girl's laugh, being swung between her parents on the path down to the lake. The sunlight caught the child's hair, glowing red curls as she giggled furiously at the apogee of the swing, insisting 'again, again' when her feet touched the ground.

"He said that if Michael and Lucifer have this showdown, half the planet'll be torched in the fallout," he continued, his voice lower as he slowed down to watch the small family, guilt pricking at him at their oblivious state to what was coming, their world, so far as they knew, safe. "It's already started."

"And the seas boiled and the skies fell," Ellie said quietly. "You know Revelations isn't a prophecy, except the last bit?"

He turned to look at her. "No, where'd you hear that?"

"It's documented," she said. "Penemue said it's a checklist, for the angels."

"Keep 'em on track to the end of the world?" he asked sourly.

"Right," she said. "You know what else?"

"Thrill me."

"It's already deviating from that list," she said, starting to walk for the hotel again. "You've already changed enough that they can't follow it."

He strode after her. "You know, I don't even know what that means!"

Turning to look at him, she said, "It means somehow you're calling the shots now, Dean. It means nothing is controlling you right now but you. Think of how that limits them."

She turned for the kerb without waiting for a response from him; not, he thought sourly, that he could've given her one; glancing down the street at the on-coming traffic and looking for a break.

"Come on, we've still got a hotel to check out."

* * *

The hotel was smaller, which made them a bit more conspicuous. Dean found himself unwillingly impressed with Ellie's ability to lie, a guileless expression on her face as she added a trace of some accent to her voice and apologised profusely for becoming lost in the back corridors of the hotel. He stayed quiet and smiled apologetically, privately reassessing his own abilities as he watched the staff unbend and become gracious, offering all sorts of help.

They swept the hotel cleaning and cooking staff twice over the next hour and as they passed the elegant black and white and heavily mirrored bar for the third time, he steered her into it.

"Just one. We can figure out if the hotel's clean or if we've missed something," he said, when she baulked at the doorway.

Sighing, Ellie agreed reluctantly. She couldn't think of anywhere else to check anyway. "Yeah. Okay."

Following him to the polished bar, she perched on a seat as he caught the attention of the bartender. The endless looping around the hotel's plush and silent corridors had felt like a physical counterpoint to her inability to think of a way to get him to admit that what was happening, with Lucifer and Heaven and Hell, didn't all lie directly on him.

The breaking of the first and last seals of the cage had been thought impossible. And looking at the effort it must have taken to manipulate so many, to alter such a number of events, she could see why most of the angels thought that it was a foolproof system. Not just the bloodlines, but the psychological pressures on their father, on themselves, on each other. _How could you ensure a man was raised to feel such responsibility and love for a brother_, she wondered distractedly as she tried to find the off-button of the flashlight under her jacket.

_How could anyone ensure the things that had happened to guide the only two men who could do it into their places – and then determine that they would do what was needed?_ Conspiracies most often fell apart because someone talks, she thought. In this case, no one had. Or if they'd figured it out, they'd either been killed or pressured into keeping quiet about it.

_The Second War is coming_, Penemue had said. The Second War was angel against angel, angel against demon, angel against mankind. She glanced at Dean, tugging impatiently at the jacket over her arm as it wrapped around the long handle of the flashlight. If he thought Armageddon was bad, he wouldn't want to hear about the Second War.

She still hadn't managed to find the damned off button when the bartender brought their drinks over. The beam swept across the man's hand, and he flinched back, looking around nervously as he clutched the injury with his other hand.

Dean looked down at his hand, seeing the crazing of the skin. He looked up into the face of the man, his face expressionless. The crocotta stared back, shocked realisation dawning in his eyes. He backed away, heading toward the door at the rear of the bar, as Dean put his glass down and started walking fast around the bar.

The flashlight was finally off, lying under the jacket on her pack, when Ellie noticed Dean putting his glass down and walking fast past her. She straightened, swivelling around on the bar stool, and saw the bartender back hurriedly out through the door.

Swearing softly under her breath, she bent and grabbed the flashlight and jacket again, and heaved her bag onto her shoulder. Dean had already passed through the door, and she didn't have a good enough working knowledge of this building to know if she could intercept them anywhere.

She rounded the end of the bar and ducked through the door, letting it close behind her. The room was a hybrid of kitchen and store-room, with another door leading out of it at the rear. Running across the room, she shoved at the door and checked the corridor both ways before she stepped out. Left or right? She couldn't see anything that would indicate which way they'd gone.

She turned left, knowing full well that the decision was mostly because her dominant hand was left, but it was a fifty-fifty chance either way. She walked fast, turning the corner at the end and seeing a swinging door into the main kitchen just closing. Running to the door, Ellie pushed through, looking around as the noise hit her. The commercial kitchen was large, with island work areas and a dozen people working there. On the far side, she saw a clear plastic curtain swaying as if someone had just passed through.

Dean would be following close, she thought, and the pursuit would drive it from the hotel. She turned around, and headed back the way she came. If she could get outside, and around the building in time, she might be able to meet them head on.

* * *

Dean increased his pace as he ran down the corridor after the crocotta. He could see glimpses of the man ahead, hear the bang of a door as it was slammed open but he wasn't really catching up. He slammed into the kitchen and saw the curtain at the end of the long room swinging violently as the crocotta vanished.

_Dammit, these things were fast. _

He dodged two sous chefs as he crossed the room, nearly sending today's special crashing to the floor. The chef managed to regain control of the dish, his face a pasty white as he swayed and teetered, the platter held high over his head. Glancing back over his shoulder for Ellie, Dean realised she must have been left behind. He hoped she knew enough about this building to be able to cut through and get ahead of it.

* * *

Ellie shot through the lobby, scattering guests. The doorman had no chance of getting the heavy door open in time; he stood back as she hit it with her shoulder, her weight and momentum forcing the slow, thick glass door open just enough to slip through.

The building sat on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street, and she raced for the corner, thumbing the flashlight back on as she rounded it. Ahead, pedestrians jumped out of her way and she could see the building's rear wall coming up. The crocotta burst from the street level courtyard fifty yards in front of her, with Dean a few paces behind. Snatching the jacket off her arm, Ellie aimed the flashlight at the crocotta, accelerating to a sprint, her lungs working like bellows as she tried to close the distance.

"Dean! Stay right!" she yelled. He veered closer to the building's side and the crocotta looked back over its shoulder. The wildly swinging beam struck its face, giving Ellie an idea of her target and she swept the invisible light up and down it, slowing to a jog as it disintegrated inside the bartender's uniform, the cloud of dust and clothing rolling a couple of feet with the monster's momentum.

* * *

Dean dropped to a fast walk as the pile of clothes fell to the pavement. He tried not to look at the passers-by, tucking his chin against his chest. There was no possible explanation for what they'd just seen. He felt Ellie come up beside him as they approached the heap, a fast sideways glance at her confirming that the flashlight was hidden in her bag, her jacket over the top of both.

He was debating if he should stop or keep going, hesitating a little, when he felt Ellie slip her arm through his, extending her stride and hurrying him along, walking them both fast eastward toward Madison. A sudden mental replay, as one of the bystanders' might've seen them, running one minute, yelling, waving the flashlight, then the bartender's startling disappearance and the two of them dropping back to a walk, powering away from the scene, popped into his head and it brought a wild bubble of laughter. How the hell she'd been able to aim the damned beam at the monster was a mystery, he thought, ducking his head and staring at the sidewalk.

Fuck, it was one to tell Bobby, he thought, his jaw aching with the effort of holding the laugh back. One to tell Sam.

"New Yorkers mind their own business," Ellie muttered at him when he turned his head to glance behind them. There wasn't much of a crowd around the bartender's clothes, he had to admit.

They turned the corner and slowed a little, and the laugh came out, fuelled by a chaotic mix of relief and disbelief at what they'd gotten away with and a brief memory of one of the on-looker's faces, a middle-aged businessman whose eyes had been like saucers as he'd stared, coming back to him. Something to tell the missus when the dude got home. He wondered if the guy'd go with experimental government death rays or aliens.

Ellie stepped away from him, head bowing as she looked down at her bag and the flash of disappointment took the fizz from his amusement, a disappointment he didn't try to look at too closely.

"Think anyone got a photo?" he asked, watching her as she fiddled with her bag, trying to get flashlight and jacket both in at the same time. "It's one for the National Enquirer," he added, imagining the headline.

She glanced up at him, shaking her head with a smile. "I think we were fast enough to get away with it," she said. "Not exactly the most discreet dispatch on a monster ever, though."

"Hey, it was the first public tryout," he protested jokingly. "And we got three of them, just in a few hours, that's not bad work."

"Not arguing," Ellie said, hitching her bag higher on her shoulder and looking around.

"You know," he said, falling into step with her as she headed downtown. "Considering everything, we don't make a bad team."

"Considering everything?" She glanced at him, mouth curving into a small smile. "You sound surprised."

He shook his head. He wasn't. He liked working with her. He didn't have to justify anything to her. "Not really."

"I'm starving, you ready to eat?" She looked up the street as they stopped at the intersection.

"Hell, yeah."

"You got a preference?" Ellie asked, waving a hand at a deli on the next corner.

"Uh," Dean hesitated. It was New York. How often was he gonna have a chance to eat something decent in a city like this?

"I could go for a steak," he said, looking around the wide, crowded avenue, wondering where in the city a good steak house might be. "And you know, they're supposed to have good steaks here. Somewhere here."

Ellie smiled. "Alright."

He looked down at her. "Nothin' fancy."

"No, just the best steaks in the city," she promised, waving her hand at a cruising yellow cab.

* * *

The little restaurant was tucked into an alley between East 42nd and Grand Central, a bar at the front and tables and booths at the back. Lit well enough to see the food, but not brightly, the walls were panelled in a dark, polished timber and the chair seats and booths were upholstered in a faded purple velvet, a little threadbare here and there. Above the bar and along the walls, hundreds of framed photographs, black and white and colour, in all sizes, were hung and Dean blinked as he recognised a few of the sports stars and celebrities as they passed, following the small, rotund man to a booth at the back wall.

"Rib eye special times two, Carlos, both rare," Ellie said, sliding into the booth and shoving her backpack along to the end. The table was simply dressed with a large candle in a glass and condiments arranged to one side. "And two Tuborgs, no glasses."

Dean dropped onto the bench seat and lifted an eyebrow at her, hiding his surprise that she knew how he liked his steak. "You been here before?"

"Whenever I'm in the city," she said, leaning back in the seat and looking at him. "It was – a friend of mine liked this place. The steaks really are the best in the city."

He looked around. The place was full, not packed, the other customers fitting no particular demographic he could see, old and young, the well-off and the not-so-well-off. Classical music played softly in the background, but it wasn't the prissy stuff.

"Your partner?"

Ellie nodded, an expression flickering over her face too fast for him to decipher. "I think you were right about the flashlights," she said, glancing at her pack. "If we don't get the others tonight, I'll get a cab down in the morning and pick up another one."

The change of subject was about as blunt as it could get, he thought, shifting a little uncomfortably in his seat. He knew what'd happened to the man who'd trained her, but not much else. It wasn't a subject she raised voluntarily or at all if she could avoid it. Exhaling softly, he looked at the polished table top. Wasn't like he didn't have a few subjects like that of his own.

"You think they'll be in the park tonight?" he asked, glancing up as Carlos brought the two bottles of beer, and set them on the table.

He picked his up, looking at the label. Copenhagen. Naturally, he thought, swallowing a mouthful cautiously. It was good, he admitted, looking at her over the lifted bottle. In the candle-light from the table, her hair shone vividly against the dark walls, her skin picking up golden highlights from the steady flame as she smiled her thanks at the restaurant's owner.

When Carlos had left, she said, "It depends on whether these are talking to each other, I guess."

Setting the bottle back on the table, Dean realised he hadn't even considered that. "You think they do?"

"I don't know," Ellie said with a lift of one shoulder. "None of the lore suggests it."

"Lore's not always right."

"Yeah," she allowed. "How long have you been working alone?"

Thinking back to the rest stop in Colorado, he looked down at his beer as he calculated the time. "Uh, about six, seven weeks. I did a job with Rufus, a couple of weeks ago."

She raised one brow curiously. "I saw Rufus last week, he told me he was on R&amp;R."

Nodding, Dean said, "Yeah, he caught a bullet, needed some time off."

"He said it was a demon," Ellie prompted and he looked at her, surprised at the old man's gabbiness. He wondered distractedly if Ellie had taken the old man a bottle of Blue.

"It was, wrapped up in a psycho," he said. "Rufus thought it was an angel, at first."

"Is that why he called you?" she asked, her mouth lifting a little at one corner.

"Yeah, angel expert, that's me," Dean said, picking up his bottle. It'd been a crappy case, and he'd been lucky that he'd gotten out with mostly bruising, not more breakages. "What about you, where've you been?"

He saw her hesitate, her gaze dropping to the table top and wondered if he'd asked the wrong thing.

"Oh, you know," she said after a moment. "This and that."

"Yeah, gimme a for-instance," he said, realising that whatever it was she didn't want to talk about, it wasn't because it'd been painful. He watched her fidget with her cutlery.

"Uh, nothing major," she hedged, looking toward the kitchen.

"If Rufus blabbed about my case to you, I'm pretty sure he'll tell me what you've been up to without much effort," Dean said to her, leaning on the table. "C'mon, what was it?"

"Threats now?" Her mouth twisted up and she rolled her eyes. "Frank asked me to help with a haunting and I ran into these two jack-asses who'd set it all up."

Dean blinked at her in surprise. He'd met Frank once, in Long Beach. The semi-retired hunter hadn't looked like he had the slightest sense of humour. "Frank set you up?"

She shook her head. "No, he couldn't make it fit, which is why he called me," she said. "Took me a few days to realise that it was a con."

"What kind of con?"

"These guys were filming everything, trying to get some stupid tv series picked up," she said and he snorted disbelievingly.

"Lemme guess? One skinny, glasses, smells kind of weird; the other chunky, screams like a girl?"

Ellie nodded, frowning at him. "You know them?"

"We met 'em," he said, his tone half-resigned, half-mockingly sour. "Sorry, we're probably the reason they're in LA. They got mixed up in a tulpa case we found in Texas, made it a helluva lot worse. When it was done, Sam fake-called them. Told them he was a producer."

He snorted softly at the memory of the two of them climbing into their crappy little car, his gift of a dead fish yet to announce itself.

"We saw 'em again in Wisconsin, a couple of years ago. They were poking around in the Morton House. Had a whole crew with them," he told her, and the memory of that fiasco drew his brows together. "Sam wiped their footage with a magnet."

"Well, you didn't do a good enough job," Ellie said caustically. "They'd wired a whole house, one that didn't have any real records of phenomena. Thought they had it all under control, but one of their group had emotional problems and attracted a poltergeist, and some poor kid with a heart murmur died in there."

"Shit, those idiots," he said, turning and leaning back as their meal arrived. "We told them not to mess about with this stuff."

The steaks were thick, tender and perfectly cooked, accompanied by baked potatoes slathered in sour cream, sautéed mushrooms and a thick, port-wine sauce and Dean inhaled his first few mouthfuls, glancing across the table to see Ellie doing the same.

"You get it sorted out?" he asked, tucking his food into his cheek.

"After a fashion," she said, her face screwing up a little. "It was like being stuck in a soap, they had these weird relationship issues all over the place and the poltergeist had too much to work with."

"Yeah, we got that too," he said. The whole Morton job had been surreal, but the ghost had been ready to gank his brother and that'd been all too real.

"How'd they get involved with a tulpa? That's not exactly middle-America?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," he said, shaking his head.

"Oh, I don't know, I've got an open mind," Ellie told him, her expression dry.

"Started as a prank," he said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. "Some kids painted an abandoned shack with symbols, only one of them was the real deal. It probably wouldn't've done anything, but those clowns filmed the place and stuck the footage on a web-site, along with the made-up story about the ghost." He forked another piece of steak, the memory of Sam's explanation and the way the ghost had changed with each new rendition on the site coming back to him. "Seemed like the thought-form grew with the number of hits they got."

"How'd you get rid of it?"

"Burned the house it was connected to," he said. "We couldn't get ahead of it any other way."

"Well, that'll do it," she said, grinning at him.

_That's your solution? Burn the whole damn place to the ground? What if the legend changes again and Mordechai is allowed to leave the house?_

"Sam was worried that the legend on the site would change and the tulpa would be able to leave it," he said, shrugging. "I couldn't think of any other way to stop kids getting killed."

"If the symbol was destroyed, the power going into it would've stopped," Ellie pointed out, and he looked at her, realising she was right. Some small tension unwound in him, something he hadn't even known he'd felt.

"Dealing with those bozos didn't take you three months," he said, giving her a half-smile. "What else?"

"Oh, you would've liked the job in Minnesota," she said, her forkful of food pausing mid-way from the plate. "Laney called me to help out."

Dean repressed a slight shiver at the name of the diminutive blonde hunter. He'd met her and her partners with Ellie on the haunted house job in 2007 and spent a few days afterward with her, barely able to walk when he'd decided he'd had enough.

Watching the red-haired woman opposite him as she talked and ate, he wondered suddenly if this was a date. It couldn't be, he thought. Neither had specifically asked anything. It was just … colleagues, he decided, cutting another piece of the melt-in-the-mouth steak. Colleagues sharing a meal. No big. Nothing like a date. Nothing further from a _date_.

"Well, you know Jeremy," Ellie said, shaking her head. "He just dropped his pants and ran, and Steve found him four miles up the road, passed out. Laney's never going to let him forget it."

He laughed at the mental image she'd conjured, the feeling tinged with a vague astonishment. He hadn't laughed like that for a long time, he thought, shaking his head as he finished his beer and Carlos appeared beside the table to take the empty, leaving a fresh bottle, beads of condensation running down its chilled sides, in its place. He hadn't felt this … easy … this … _relaxed_ … for a long time. It was something he'd missed, when Meg had taken out almost every friend they'd had. Something he still missed, the thought sobering him.

"Oh, I got that beat," he said, washing the food down with a mouthful of the icy-cold beer. "You hear about the water wraith in Miller's Marsh, near Blue Earth?"

She shook her, her eyes widening a little as she looked at him. He told her about it, the memory only a little tainted by what had happened after, a feeling of warmth spreading through him as he watched her trying not to laugh at his more-or-less honest recounting of the job that had gone spectacularly wrong in every conceivable way. He was exaggerating a little, but he found he liked making her laugh, liked the way her eyes brightened as she listened to him, the fine lines all smoothed out and every trace of that last, lingering tension between them gone.

"You made that up!" she said, tipping her head back when he'd finished and wiping her eyes.

"God's truth, every word," he told her, shaking his head. "Took me three days to get the last of the mud out of – well, you know."

There was a part of him, he acknowledged wryly, that wanted to stay here, right here, just like this, being human, feeling … normal … and not feeling the yawning differences he felt with other people. His memories of Hell, of the pain and knowledge of the last few months, had all but vanished in the past couple of days.

There was another part that looked at her, and tightened when he thought of her hunting, alone, at risk of death. He knew she liked doing the job. Knew she was good at it. He didn't know how the hell she'd managed to get the knowledge and skill and experience she had. She was, as Jo had pointed out acerbically to him, six years younger than himself, two years younger than Sam, and what she knew, the resources she could call on, far outstripped their combined lifetime's knowledge. It wasn't a life forced on her, she'd told him. It'd been her choice. Would it've been different for him, for his brother, if that had been the case for them, he wondered?

"Me and Sam," he said a moment later, a little hesitantly. "Our dad raised us in this life, you know."

She nodded, leaning on her elbows on the table as she looked at him.

"But you – how'd you get this far?" he asked awkwardly, thinking of what he'd seen her do, what he knew she'd done. "I mean, we've seen a lot of hunters who figured it out themselves –"

"The first hunt I attempted …" she cut him off quietly, her gaze dropping to the table. "I, uh, I'd read a lot, and I spent most of my time studying things I thought I was going to need – my aunt, she's well-off, and she – she's not exactly maternal, so she was pretty happy that I was doing a lot of extra-curricular stuff, and she didn't really ask too much about it."

She lifted her head, eyes half-closing as she looked back. "None of it really helped, not the way I thought it would, with the job. It was a vampire, in Boston, and I'd been tracking the deaths. I was damned lucky it was working solo, and damned unlucky it was an older one." Letting out her breath, she looked at him. "I'd've died on that one, if another hunter hadn't been working it as well."

He didn't need to ask who the hunter had been. After the conversation with Jo, he'd asked around a little about Ellie's dead partner, and been impressed by what he'd heard. Furente had been very experienced, and very well-connected in the loose network of hunters in this country and others, and those who lived on the edges of their world.

"Anyway," Ellie continued, her voice becoming brisk. "I met a lot of people after that, people who were more or less persuaded to teach me what I needed to know."

"More or less?"

"I can be hard to put off, when I want something," she said, smiling at him.

"Yeah, that I noticed," he said. "So, uh, all the … uh, languages, the lore, the … uh, mental state stuff, that was your partner?"

"No," she said. "No, I learned some of it from him, but most after he'd gone."

She looked across the room and he followed her gaze, noticing that most of the other customers had left, the room almost empty. It was a week night, he thought, glancing at his watch.

"We should get going," she said, nodding to the proprietor as he appeared behind the bar. "I'll get this."

He shook his head. "No, I'll get it." He reached for his back pocket, as she pulled out a wallet from her pack. "I'm the one who wanted a real meal."

She smiled at him and shook her head. "Yeah, but I picked this place," she countered, looking up as Carlos deposited the check on the table. "Thank you, Carlos."

"Everything was good?" Carlos asked, his gaze swivelling from Ellie to Dean.

"It was superb, as usual," she said, and Dean nodded agreement, dropping his card on the small plastic tray before she could get hers out. The small act surprised him. It wasn't like him to fight over a check.

"It's not a date," she pointed out, and his heart gave a weird and uncomfortable double-boom in his chest.

"No, but, uh …" He shrugged. "If I'd picked a place, I don't think it'd've been this good."


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

* * *

The decision to walk back to the hotel wasn't something they needed to discuss. It wasn't that far, a few blocks south and east. The city was still hot and airless, and Ellie had left her jacket bundled up in her backpack, strolling along the street, seemingly relaxed. He followed, all the things stirred up with the evening's randomly rolling conversation still filling his head. He couldn't remember the last time he'd just … lived … he thought. Just talked to someone, without lying or leaving things out, talking about the people they both knew, the hunts they'd done, things that had happened in their lives without the need to hide anything. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had a meal with someone, no expectations, no agenda, no hassle.

"You're lucky to have a brother," Ellie said as they walked down Lexington.

He glanced sideways at her. Her parents had been killed when she'd been ten. Both of them, he thought, taken by an evil they hadn't brought on themselves or even known about. He'd spent his life hating the evil that'd come into his life, taken his mother, driven his father to a state of revenge that had eventually killed him as well, poisoned his brother, but, he considered, he could've been left completely alone.

"Yeah," he said, ducking his head. Sam'd always had his back. Except for when he hadn't. The thought and its attached memories scoured him and he shoved them aside, wondering how the hell he was going to get to a point where it didn't feel like a fresh knife wound, each and every time.

He'd hunted alone, not often, not really, and not for long stretches of time. Just when his father had gone off on his own and left him with coordinates or a news clipping, or he'd spotted something suspicious on his own. Those hunts, that time, between Sam's leaving for Stanford, and his father's disappearance, had been oddly enjoyable. His own man. His own wheels. His own destiny, to take the jobs he wanted, to go where he wanted. He'd felt a curious freedom in those times. No responsibilities except to himself and to the job he'd loved, back then.

"You like hunting alone?" he asked the woman walking beside him.

She looked up at him. "Uh, mostly, yeah. I'd rather not have someone else to worry about."

He nodded. He'd felt the same way, on those hunts. He'd felt the same way the last few weeks, even when he'd worked with Rufus, and now, with Ellie. They were collaborating but he wasn't trying to protect them, to keep them safe, he realised slowly. No hunt was entirely a cake-walk, he knew, but he'd enjoyed the jobs a helluva lot more with Rufus, and with the woman beside him, in the last few weeks, than he had for the last four years with his brother.

"Don't get me wrong," Ellie continued, looking down the street. "There're times when I need backup and I don't take unnecessary risks, or take a shot just because it's there, but mostly, you know, the job's a lot of look-up time and not much action."

Out of the narrow gap between two buildings, a man appeared in front of them, the streetlight further up glinting off the narrow knife he held.

"Gimme your cash!"

Dean stopped and looked at him. Small, skinny, pocked skin and a straggle of slow-growing, slightly curly beard patchy over his jawline, the guy was jonesing, he thought. Not bad yet, but getting there.

"You gotta be kidding me," he said, frowning at the dude.

"You want to get cut up?" the guy snarled at him, jabbing the knife tip toward him. "You want me to cut up your bitch?"

"Take it easy," he said, his gaze cutting right to see Ellie taking a sideways step away from him. He took a small step to his left, increasing the gap between them and forcing the man into having to turn his head from one to the other to keep both of them in sight.

"You think this asshole knows what a mistake he's making?" he asked Ellie, keeping his gaze on the man as the knife blade twitched, first in his direction, then in hers.

"No, I don't think he has a clue," Ellie replied, taking another step toward the other side of the tight alley.

"Shut up! Stop moving!" the guy snapped, and Dean shook his head a little at the erratic movements of the man's knife hand. No idea what he was doing, he decided, taking another step sideways and a little closer to him.

The mugger stood indecisively between them, belatedly realising that he'd been forced into completely losing sight of one in order to keep the other in view. Dean smiled inwardly as he saw the man make a snap decision as to which of them was likely to be more trouble.

_Wrong_, he thought as the guy swung toward him belligerently and behind him, Ellie walked unhurriedly to the three metal trashcans standing just within the alley's mouth.

"Do we leave him standing, or take him out?" he asked, looking past the mugger and sliding his hand into his pocket.

"I'll fucking kill you if you don't shut the fuck up and gimme your money!"

"Well, I don't want to think about who else he might mug after we're gone," she replied, her tone reproving.

"Bitch!"

The man swung back to Ellie as she yanked the lid of one of the trashcans free, holding it vertical by the handle, a shield against the knife. He lunged toward her, the knife dropping low, and the lid dropped to meet it, a high-pitched screech of metal on metal as she took a stride forward and thrust the lid at him, pushing him back.

Dean watched him try to get the blade under, around and over the lid, getting more frustrated as the improvised shield met the knife's tip each time. Ellie was slamming it at him, pushing him backwards toward Dean in a clumsy, uncoordinated scuffle of feet, punctuated by vicious swearing as each hit jarred the guy's hand and arm through the blade.

Taking a step into the alleyway toward them, he saw the mugger's head swing around to him, wincing in anticipation as Ellie slammed the edge of the lid up, a brutal hit to the mugger's exposed jaw, the impact clanging and echoing in the confined space.

Dean shook his head. "That looked like it hurt."

Pulling his gun out casually, he told himself he was just taking precautions. Ellie swung the lid in a diagonal slash that met the man's wrist precisely on the nerve centre near the base of the thumb. The knife dropped and skidded across the cracked concrete and the man's grunt of pain was clearly audible, turning into a flow of curses at her that ceased abruptly when he saw the automatic pointed at him.

"Who the fuck _are_ you people?" the mugger said, his eyes wide as he backed away from them.

"Anti-violence Brigade," Ellie said, stepping close to him, her hand gripping his numbed arm. "Sit down."

She was surprisingly strong for her size, Dean knew, but it wasn't strength that forced the mugger to collapse on the ground at her feet. He stepped forward, reversing the gun and hitting him sharply behind the ear with the butt as Ellie's grip on the nerve centre in the mugger's shoulder held him motionless. The man's eyes rolled up and he fell over backwards, his pain and humiliation forgotten as consciousness disappeared.

"What do we do with him?" Dean asked, looking down at the guy. "We kind of got other plans for tonight."

Kneeling beside him, Ellie rummaged in her backpack, pulling out a Ziploc plastic bag filled with long cable ties and extracting two. She handed them to him.

"Hands and ankles, not too tight."

Dean looked at the big leather bag, brows rising. "Is there anything you don't have in that bag?" he asked, taking them from her and crouching beside the unconscious man. He dragged the mugger's wrists together and cinched the tie in place.

"I like to be prepared," she told him absently as she drew out her notebook and a marker. Dean threaded the second tie around the man's ankles and pulled it tight then walked around to look over her shoulder as she wrote on a page and tore it out, tucking it into the mugger's waistband. He snorted at the message and held out his hand, pulling her to her feet as she shoved the marker back into the bag.

"Where's his knife?" she asked, her gaze flicking over the ground toward the street.

"Here," Dean said, picking up a piece of newspaper from the open trash can and wrapping it around the knife's haft to lift it. Dropping it onto the guy's chest, he dumped the newssheet and looked around. "Phone it in?"

"Yep."

Dean pulled out his cell and dialled 911, giving the operator the nature of the attack and the address and hanging up as he walked to the mouth of the alley.

"Really didn't know what hit him, huh?" he said to Ellie with a wide grin as he glanced back over his shoulder at the guy propped up against the trashcans.

"I wish they were all that easy," Ellie said, lifting her hair from her neck and wiping at the perspiration that sheened her skin from the few minutes of action.

She'd made it look ridiculously easy, he thought, knowing it hadn't been. His gaze involuntarily followed the path of her hand, and he jerked it away, looking ahead down the street.

"What time do you want to hit the park?" he asked. They were only a couple of blocks from the hotel.

"After midnight, I think," she said, a small crease appearing between her brows as she thought about it. "When did you get the last one?"

"Around eleven," he told her, thinking back. "Or maybe it was closer to midnight. We wait too long and we'll miss them."

A deep rumble of thunder, distant across the river, echoed softly between the tall buildings and they both looked in that direction. He should've felt the build up, he thought, watching as sheet lightning lit up the sky over New Jersey.

"Maybe not."

* * *

The hotel was less than a hundred yards ahead when the outriding gusts of the storm blew into the city, adding a hundred percent humidity to the oven-like heat. Running along the sidewalk, Ellie was tempted to slow down, tip her head back and let the rain soak her, it was only the thought of the expensive flashlight and her all-too-vulnerable laptop and notes in her bag that kept her pelting along behind Dean as the rain poured down, lashed this way and that by the wind funnelled through the narrow gaps between the buildings. Across the city, blue-white light strobed as lightning struck down, not one or two bolts but dozens, thunder rumbling and crashing in a continuous cacophony.

There was no way anything would be out there tonight, she thought as they raced up the steps of the hotel and stopped, dripping, in the lobby. No victim would go out into the tempest willingly and the monsters would know it.

Both looked up as the lights in the hotel's lobby flickered, flared and died on the heels of that thought. She heard Dean swear softly, then a click and his flashlight beam swung around the pitch-black room, stopping on the stairs.

In the reflection from the beam, she caught his slightly sour smile, as he headed for them.

Dean'd taken down one of the six she'd thought were in the city, and they'd killed another three today, she thought, climbing the stairs after him. That left two, at least. They could check the remaining hotels in the morning. She wondered if the creatures communicated with each other. Or followed the news reports. The damned lore was thin on them, most of it had been compiled before the Industrial Revolution and warned about the dangers of forests and marshes. New York City might be considered a jungle but it was a long way from the boreal forests of India and Russia.

On the fourth floor, the heat was worse, and she wiped ineffectually at the perspiration dripping down her neck, waiting for Dean to unlock the room door. It wasn't going to be any better in there, and with no power, she couldn't even get relief with a cold shower.

As they stepped in, Ellie grimaced, feeling the wall of unmoving warmth in the room. "Oh good," she said. "Our own personal sauna."

He snorted and walked to the small table, tipping the flashlight on end and setting it there, the beam pointing straight up at the ceiling. In the very dim and diffused reflection, they could see the shapes of the furniture, enough to avoid it. Ellie reluctantly closed the door, telling herself it was just her imagination that the room seemed to gain a couple of extras degrees heat.

She glanced at Dean as he walked to the windows and started wrestling with the frames, fighting decades-old layers of paint and pulling out his knife to cut through. Opening her backpack, she felt around until she found the small bundle of candles she carried with her, pulling them out and going to the kitchen counter for a couple of saucers.

* * *

Dean looked around as the candle-light brightened the room, watching Ellie light another couple and move the saucers to strategic areas.

"You're kidding?"

"What?" She turned to look at him. "You don't have candles in the trunk of the Impala?"

He turned back to the window without answering. There were a bunch of big, fat pillar candles in one of the bags in the trunk, he knew. He just hadn't thought of them.

"You gotta deck of cards in that bag?" he asked, running his knife deeper under the frame.

She laughed. "Poker? With you? I think I'm gonna have to pass."

"Huh, do I smell fear?"

"Prudence."

He grunted as the knife blade finally cleared out the thick paint and the window frame shifted a little. Changing his grip, he pushed up again and was rewarded by the frame opening a couple of inches, a – not cool, he thought, but definitely moving and cool-er – breeze gusting through the narrow opening along with splashes of rain.

The candle flames shivered in unison with the air movement and Ellie moved them around, shielding them from the draught.

Dean walked to the other window and pulled out his knife again, working along the edge. When both were open wide enough for a minimum for fresh air without letting in too much water, he turned to the table, looking at the woman sitting there, bent over her notebook and writing, her hair drying, the shades in it slowly lightening from mahogany to copper, lit up by the bright gold of the candlelight.

"Nothing's moving in this," he said, gesturing to the windows.

"No," Ellie agreed, looking up. "There's no definitive lore on it, but I can't think of a single creature, other than rawheads, that try and find victims in storms."

He saw her lean on the table and wince, the expression flickering almost too fast to notice.

"What's wrong?"

Rolling her shoulder cautiously and looking at it, she said, "I hit the front door of the last hotel with it to get out. It's just a bit tender, it'll be fine."

He remembered the thick, heavy glass doors of the Pierre A Taj and turned toward his bag. Pamela had given him a bottle of stuff, after he'd dislocated his shoulder jumping out of the church window. It'd worked well, he recalled, enough to let him use the arm the next day. He'd used it again after Chicago. There should be some left.

"I got some stuff for that," he told her, his fingers digging through his bag and pulling out the almost-empty bottle. "Not much left but it didn't take a lot."

He looked down at the beaded top, frowning. "Uh, you want to …?"

Nodding, she got to her feet, grabbing her pack and one of the candles and walking to the bathroom to change.

Rain spattered against the windows and he looked around, wondering how long it would last. Beyond the dark glass, lightning was continuing to strobe the city, the continuous roar of thunder drowning out the distant sirens and alarms.

_Think how that limits them_, she'd said earlier. The trouble was he couldn't think of anything he could do that was going to stop Armageddon. The angels were too powerful.

_Let's see how … Sam does without his lungs?_

How was he supposed to fight that? How was he supposed to change anything?

Every second they'd been in River Pass, he'd been aware that he'd been watching his brother, looking for signs that God's magical cleansing hadn't took, that Sam was going to go back to drinking blood. The conversation at the rest stop had only confirmed that Sam was afraid of the same thing, despite his little brother's vehement protests when they'd been hunting War.

_I'm in no shape to be hunting. I need to step back, 'cause I'm dangerous. Maybe it's best we just ... go our separate ways._

Relief. It'd been relief he'd felt when Sam had said it first. He couldn't find a way to forgive and forget. He couldn't keep going, not being able to trust, not being able to able to do his job – or even think of how he was going to keep under Zachariah's radar.

This was better, he thought. His head was clearer than it'd been for a long time. He could figure things out better on his own. The bathroom door opened, and he glanced around, watching Ellie come out, the black pants and top replaced by a pair of men's dark blue cotton boxers and a loose white singlet.

As she sat down at the table, he walked over to her, moving the candle to illuminate her right shoulder. She swivelled a little in the chair, pulling the singlet strap down to her elbow, giving him a better view of the reddened and slightly swollen point of the shoulder. The bruising was already coming up, hard to see in the warm tones of the light but lying like a shadow under her skin.

"Man, you must've hit that hard."

Ellie snorted. "I was in a rush. You should've seen the doorman's face."

His mouth quirked up and he pulled out a chair behind her, sitting down as he poured a little of thick white liquid from the bottle onto her skin.

The jolt that ran through him as his fingertip touched her skin made him start slightly, as if he'd accidentally touched a low-voltage electrical current. He saw her jaw muscle clench at the same time. _The hell was that_, he wondered, dropping his gaze to her shoulder and spreading the lotion over the skin, aware that his pulse had increased, and he was having some trouble getting enough breath. Under his fingers, the muscles of her shoulder and neck were hard and rigid.

"Uh …" He didn't know what to say, or if he should say anything. They were hunting. She was a friend. He didn't have that many left, and he needed to be able to trust someone. Ducking his head as he felt her take in a deep breath and release it, he tried to get his focus back on the tense shoulder in front of him.

_You know, you could just ask her out. She probably wouldn't say no._

The voice was his brother's. The memory was from 2007. Denton, Michigan. His brows drew together, jaw tightening in the same reaction he'd had back then to Sam's suggestion, sitting in the bar, watching her dance with the sheriff.

"What?" she asked, and he shook his head, pouring a little more of the creamy liquid onto her shoulder, Under his fingertips, her skin was warm and smooth and he was suddenly aware that the small circles his hand was making over her shoulder and down the shoulder blade had slowed, as she seemed to relax all at once, the sound of a long exhale audible even over the thunder, the stiffness of her muscles dissolving gradually under his touch.

"Nothing," he managed to get out, a little breathlessly as he looked at her profile, seeing her eyes half-closed, the shadow of her lashes trembling over her cheek.

For a moment, the world shrank, spiralling right down to the pool of light of the candles on the table, even the outside noises, of thunder and beeps, hoots and sirens, muted down and disappearing. The pads of his fingers were warm and he stretched his hand out, smoothing the lotion up the slight curve to her neck and down the hard plane of her shoulder blade, a slow heat that had nothing to do with the accumulated warmth of the room seeping through him. Glancing again at her profile, he saw her eyes had closed, her mouth was slightly open and her breathing wasn't any more even than his own.

_Fuck._

The lotion had disappeared into her skin and he realised he was still rubbing. Lifting his hand away, he swallowed as Ellie turned her head to look at her shoulder, drawing the singlet strap back up over it.

"Thanks."

"Uh … Ellie." His voice sounded weird, and he cleared his throat, no idea what he was going to say, not quite able to just let it go.

"Might as well catch up on the sleep missed," Ellie said. She didn't look at him as she got to her feet and walked to the window, half-crouching in front of the open gap. "This looks like it's settled in."

Looking down at the bottle on the table, Dean nodded uncomfortably, reaching for the cap and screwing it back on. He got up and dropped the bottle into his bag, shifting it back to the floor.

* * *

Aside from the reflections of the candle flames in the black glass, the outside world was in complete darkness, the wind calming, the air cooler as it gusted fitfully between the buildings, carrying a load of fine rain into the room with it.

Ellie looked past her reflection to that of the man behind her, watching him move around the room. Through the narrow gap of the window, the capricious breeze played over her skin, taking the heat and as another fine spray of droplets blew in, cooling her down enough for sleep to be a possibility.

The creamy stuff he'd used had done the job, she thought, straightening up. The ache had receded. The sensations his touch had generated, however, were still fluttering along her nervous system, a jittering memory in her skin and she turned from the window, keeping her back to him and her gaze on the floor, not sure how much of what she felt was showing.

She dropped onto the lumpy sofa, noting that it was well out of the breezeway and shrugging to herself. Four nights of not more than a couple of hours of sleep would take care of that, she decided, lying down and flipping the sheet over her.

It wasn't the heat that was going to prevent her from getting the rest she needed, she acknowledged irritably several minutes later, as she changed position again.

"Can't sleep?" Dean's voice was low as it drifted across the room.

"Too hot," she admitted, without turning over.

"You could sleep here," he suggested, and she heard him roll over on the bed, the mattress creaking a little. "There's enough room for two."

For a wild second, she was sorely tempted to agree. Let the cards fall where they might, she thought, at the very least, she'd get some sleep, free from the arousal that filled her and the still heat that seemed to surround the damned sofa.

He'd break her heart one day. She'd known that for a long time now, from the moment she'd admitted to herself that her past had tangled with her present and something about him had taken a hold. There'd been no real reasons, back then. Just the feeling. Now, there were reasons. Now, she knew him, not everything but enough to know that the hold would never fade away.

Not today, she told herself forcefully, shunting temptation aside.

"I'm fine," she told him, digging her shoulder deeper against the pillow. She heard his exhale from across the room and closed her eyes tightly, dragging up an image, visualising it strongly, her feelings and thoughts slipping away as it sharpened in her mind's eye.

* * *

On the bed, Dean huffed out an exhale and rolled onto his back, brows drawn together. The hell he'd been thinking, he wondered, staring at the ceiling. The offer had been bonafide, it _was_ cooler on the bed, in the light breeze from the windows, and there was enough room for two – it'd only occurred to him that it could've been construed as a clumsy pass after the words had exited his mouth.

He turned his head, looking at the sofa and the ghostly white figure there, half-shrouded beneath the light sheet, feeling again the frisson along his nerves as memory threw up the sensations that'd twisted through him when his fingertips had touched her skin. The hell had that been anyway?

Rolling over onto his shoulder, he pushed the feeling aside, aggravated when it refused to go entirely. She hadn't left him in any doubt that it was strictly a working arrangement. Nothing had changed to make him think any different.

It was just the heat, he decided, just the heat and working a bit too closely. He realised he was still in his clothes as the breeze died, leaving him too warm. Sitting up, he pulled off his shirt, loosening the laces of his boots and toeing them off one by one, the clunks as they fell to the thin carpet inordinately loud in the silence. He looked down at his jeans, the denim suddenly hot in the airless room, and unbuttoned the fly, the bed creaking and groaning as he shifted his weight to drag them off and lie down again.

_Get your head back in the game_, he told himself, twisting around. _Not like any of your problems have disappeared_. They hadn't. The mess was still there, still unsolvable, and the one person he thought he might be able to talk it out with was, judging by the steady, soft sounds and lack of movement from the sofa, sound asleep.

_I killed two angels this week. My brothers. I'm hunted. I rebelled and I did it – all of it – for you. And you failed. You and your brother destroyed the world. And I lost everything – for nothing. So keep your opinions to yourself._

He flinched a little at the memory of the angel's words. It wasn't fair, but it was the truth, he thought, eyes screwing shut. He'd asked the angel to do what was right and it'd all gone to hell anyway.

_The angels have something good in store for you. A second chance. Really? 'Cause I'm pretty sure, deep down, you know something nasty's coming down the road. Trust your instincts, Dean. There's no such thing as miracles._

The reaper had told him, straight out confirming what Ellie'd had said all along, and he hadn't wanted to believe her either. His instincts had told him to trust in the angels. They'd also told him to trust in the woman lying not ten feet from him. The first had been a cluster-fuck of a mistake. The second … he hadn't believed, not enough.

No second chance for him. No second chance for his little brother. All of it, all the things he'd been told by the angels and the demons had been lies. Even Sam had lied to him. And Sam was his weakness, he knew it well enough. Sam was the only leverage anyone needed that would make him back down, make him give up. He wondered bleakly if just staying apart was going to be enough.

Cas was off hunting for God. Sam was in the wind, on his own, fighting his demons. And he was … lost, he thought. The day-to-day was fine. Better than fine. It was clear. The big picture was still out of view. The Devil and Heaven's most powerful archangel were walking the earth, looking for him and Sam and he couldn't come up with a way to make it stop.

He yawned, the brittle restlessness finally breaking down, exhaustion sucking at him. Tessa had warned him against hope, against wanting something that was impossible. The more fatalistic side of his nature was inclined to agree with her. He opened his eyes, turning to look at the still figure on the couch. Ellie had told him that he was changing things. He didn't understand why, but he didn't feel that despair when she was around. He felt like he could do anything, he just needed to figure it out, the right way to do it. His eyes closed again, the blackness behind the lids filled with an image.

_Her skin had been so soft._

The thought followed him down as the image faded and sleep filled him up.

* * *

Dean woke abruptly, the room filled with sunshine, a tell-tale stickiness in his shorts making him groan slightly under his breath. He opened an eye, relieved to see that the room was empty.

_Didn't mean she hadn't been around to see it_, he told himself acerbically, levering himself up on one elbow. _Or smell it_. The scent rose thickly as he swung his legs off the bed and got to his feet. On the nightstand, the small digital clock was flashing mindlessly and he padded barefoot to the bathroom. He couldn't remember what dreams he'd had, but they hadn't been of darkness and pain and Hell, and the familiar looseness in his muscles, not to mention the quantity of liquid now drying inside his shorts, seemed to indicate that his orgasm had been a pretty satisfying one.

In the bathroom, he peeled off the shorts and tossed them into the bottom of the tub, turning on the taps and getting in without waiting for the water to heat. _It'd been a while_, he thought, just a little defensively. _No time to play when the apocalypse was nipping at your heels_.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, he was sitting at the table, trying to drink a second cup of the hotel's execrable coffee when the door opened and Ellie walked in.

He glanced up at her, trying to gauge from her expression what, if anything, she'd been witness to earlier in the morning.

"You get the second flashlight?" he asked as she looked at him, her nose wrinkling up at the acrid smell of the coffee.

"Yep," she answered, looking around the room. She looked distracted, he thought. "You want to get some real coffee?"

"Yeah." He pushed the half-drunk cup aside and got to his feet. "Storm gone?"

"Completely," she said. "It's a lot cooler."

It was, he found, as they exited on to the street, walking across to the diner.

"How many hotels do we need to check?"

"Four big ones," Ellie told him, following the waitress to a table by the window and sitting down. "I thought we could split up this time, take two each."

He frowned. "Worked pretty good yesterday, me chasing and you intercepting?"

She didn't answer, taking a rolled up newspaper from her bag and tossing it onto the table in front of him. The paper unrolled and the headline stood out starkly, the photograph underneath it grainy but recognisable. The guy she'd been with in the nightclub.

_**Billionaire City Developer Missing.**_

Underneath the inch-high bold, the report was thin on facts. The guy's car had been found a block from Central Park, next to the Carlyle, a hotel on East 76th Street. He was missing, presumed dead, but no body had been found.

He looked up at her. "This isn't your fault. I thought the storm'd keep everyone inside too."

Shaking her head at him, Ellie's face screwed up. "Don't. I just – we'll go faster if we split up."

"No, we won't," he said, his gut twisting a little as he recognised the ploy. He'd used it enough times on his little brother. "We'll get them, Ellie, but we'll do it together, alright?"

She looked away, her mouth set mulishly and he looked up as the waitress appeared beside him.

"Two specials, two black," he barked out, watching the woman impatiently as she took the order and turned away.

"Look, the Carlyle, that's a place to start, right?" he said, as soon as she was out of earshot. "He must've gone there, the car was there."

"Yeah."

"Okay, so that's what I'm talking about," he said, making a silent resolution not to do this to his brother, if he ever saw Sam again. The thought of Ellie, hunting recklessly for revenge through the big hotels was making his palms sweat.

Their coffees arrived, the waitress thumping the cups onto the table and filling them, and he made another mental note to leave a bigger tip.

"Why didn't the angels just kill Sam if they wanted to beat Lucifer," he asked, shooting a glance across the surface of his coffee. "Zachariah threatened him."

"They won't," she said, and he saw make an effort to push the headline out of her thoughts. "They want their big showdown, they want their paradise."

"So, they wouldn't kill Sam, even to try to get me to consent?"

"I guess they might try it," she said, looking into her cup. "But they won't go through with it. I don't think Michael would even let them."

She glanced up at him, rubbing the heel of her hand against her temple. "They want things to follow the blueprint, Dean," she said slowly. "They want it just like they're expecting it. Every time you screw it up, it makes them more nervous."

"What if, Sam and me, we just stay hidden?"

"I guess they'll pick their substitutes and go from there," she told him, leaning back as the food arrived. "That will get their panties in a twist, but what effect it would have on the final outcome? I don't know."

She picked up her cutlery. "What does your angel friend say about this?"

"He doesn't seem to know much about it," he said. "He's looking for God."

"Uh huh."

"Yeah."

* * *

At street level, the Carlyle looked like some swank restaurant, he thought, following Ellie inside as the doorman held the doors for them. Inside, the plush interior was darker than the others, smaller and more intimate. They made it through the lobby and headed down a hall, his flashlight hidden under a coat over his arm as he ran it over the staff they came across.

They worked their way through the service areas, and headed up in the elevator.

"How much do these rooms run to, anyway?" he asked as they came out into a long hall.

"Varies by season, but around now, between seven and eight hundred per night," Ellie told him, walking fast down the corridor.

"What?" He looked around. "What jackass pays that much for a bed for a night?"

She snorted, turning to look at him, one brow arched.

"Seriously?!"

"Hey, occasionally it's nice to be pampered," Ellie said, turning back as the soft rattle of a housekeeping cart caught her attention.

The cart came around the corner of the hallway and the old man pushing it looked at them. Dean lifted his light, and the beam must've touched the guy's hand because he snatched it to his chest, spinning around and disappearing back behind the corner in a flash.

"Got a winner," Dean said, racing down the hall after him, hearing the thud of Ellie's feet following him.

"The service elevators are two lefts down this hall," Ellie called out, as she fell behind.

Throwing a glance back, he saw her stop and swing around, heading back the way they'd come.

He kept the old geezer's coat-tails in sight until they hit the bottom of the service stairs, then he lost him, coming out of the stairwell into a maze of corridors, open storage rooms and the big, steam-filled laundries. Dean half-ran through them, checking for movement, swinging the flashlight around and almost ran head-on into Ellie as he rounded a corner leading to the hotel's loading bay.

"Where is it?" she asked, braking suddenly in front of him, her gaze flashing around the wide bay.

"It didn't come through here?"

"I didn't see it," she said, taking a step back and turning around. "Must have doubled back somewhere deeper."

They spent the next two hours searching the Carlyle's ground floor for the creature and came up empty. Dean shook his head as he saw Ellie emerge from the kitchens.

"Nothing," he said, turning and falling into step with her.

"Dammit."

"Fucking thing ran like Michael Johnson," he said, a note of apology in his voice as he steered her out toward the lobby. "We'll get it on the flip side, in the park tonight."

She nodded, following him out through the doors and onto the street.

"What next?" he asked when they were walking away from the hotel.

"Trump, I think," Ellie said, a crease appearing between her brows. "The others are smaller."

"Smaller wouldn't be bad," Dean said, wincing a little as he felt his legs stiffening from the miles of walking and bouts of fast action.

"Did you get the impression that it knew we were trouble, even before you flashed the light over it?" Ellie asked, ignoring the remark.

He thought back, remembering the old dude's startled look at them. "Maybe."

"I think the others know about us," Ellie said, shaking her head.

"How?"

"I don't know," she admitted with a shrug. "But I get the feeling that they're in the biggest hotels, not the smaller ones."

* * *

The Trump International Hotel proved to be a loser as well, something Dean found suspicious, given its proximity to the park. They traipsed up and down the floors, corridors, through the service areas and bars and restaurants for almost three hours before Ellie was ready to admit defeat.

Walking back out through the gleaming gold and glass and black marble lobby, Dean rubbed his hand over his face, wondering if the lore was wrong – or at least, incomplete – on the crocottas, and they did share information, or maybe warn each other. They weren't common monsters – he'd only run into one, and from his father's journal, he knew John had only found one in the more than twenty years of hunting his father has clocked up. Bobby and Rufus had said much the same thing.

The city was an ideal hunting ground for them, he thought, looking around as they walked down the street. Millions of people lived here, worked here, visited here. Even so, he realised slowly, they'd been cautious. Taking out-of-towners mostly. Luring the vics to the park, usually the bodies left without a mark on them. Heart failure, the coroner's reports had said, one after the other. Nothing for anyone to go on.

He glanced sideways at the woman walking beside him, recognising the inwardly directed concentration, but unable to get a feel for what she was thinking. The heat was returning to the city, after the morning's freshness, and the standing water from the storm had increased the humidity again. He tugged at the collar of his shirt, feeling the dampness around his neck and decided he'd get a six-pack on the way back to the hotel.

_Hotel_, he thought derisively. After the last two days spent wandering through the city's best hotels, he wasn't sure he could apply the term to the fleapit he was staying in.

"So, uh, when you said you could get a room, when you found me, you meant in one of these places?" he asked, knowing what the answer would be.

Ellie looked around at him and nodded. "Yeah, they usually have something free," she said, her gaze flicking along the street.

Something, he thought. Like a suite, kept on hold for some visiting gazillionaire? How much would that've cost? A grand? Two? He ducked his head, his gaze on the pavement. It was another reminder of how much there was that he didn't know about her. Sliding another sideways glance at her, he wondered a little at the fact that it didn't seem raise his alarms, not the way not knowing other people did, at any rate.

_You saved my life. I wanted to clear that debt_. She'd told him that after Chicago, and he realised it was bullshit. If she hadn't been there in Black Springs … he didn't think Sam could've pulled that off on his own. The debt was squared, had been for a long time. So why'd she tried to save him from Hell? Tried to help him and Sam against the combined forces of Heaven and Hell.

It was her planet too, he reasoned, slowing a little. Didn't have to be all about him, after all. Lucifer loose was everyone's problem.

He looked up in surprise as she turned in front of him, walking up the steps and pushing the squeaking door to the hotel open.

"Uh, you want something to eat?" he asked, hesitating at the foot of the steps.

Ellie turned around and looked down at him. "Sure, sandwich would be fine."

"Same as last time?"

"Yeah, and something cold to drink," she added, lifting her head to look at the sky.

"Got it, I'll be about ten," he said, turning away and heading for the delicatessen down the street as she continued inside.

There would be two to take care of tonight, he thought as he increased the length of his stride. He felt a faint prickle along the back of his neck at the thought.

* * *

Opening the door to the room, he grimaced at the warmth he could already feel, wrapping around him as he stepped inside. Ellie sat by the window, hair loose and damp, in the long, loose tee shirt she'd worn the first night. She looked about fifteen, he thought absently as he dropped the paper sack of food onto the table, extracting two beers from the six pack and handing her one and carrying the rest to the grumbling bar fridge under the narrow counter. Not that he could really imagine her ever being fifteen, he thought disparagingly. When he'd met her, she'd seemed older than her years, closer to his age, her experience worn like armour.

"Four down, not bad for a couple of days' work," he said, opening his beer and taking a mouthful.

"No," she agreed absently, her gaze drifting to the window. "Nothing on the news except they found Henry's body. Not a mark."

His eyes narrowed as he tried to gauge her reaction from the comment. He couldn't see anything that suggested the tight recklessness that'd filled her that morning.

"We're not going to get both tonight," she continued, taking another bite from the dripping concoction in her hands and licking her fingers when she'd chewed and swallowed. "The one that took Henry won't need to feed for a few days."

He'd thought the same thing, walking back with their food, going back over his memories of the way the crocotta had behaved with him and Sam. "Might not need to but that probably won't stop it from killing someone anyway."

She looked around at him.

"The one we found, in Ohio, it wasn't just killing to feed," he said, sorting through the memories of that hunt. They were painful. He'd wanted to believe that his father was free of Hell, that somehow he could still talk to him. "It sent me after some other guy, just to get a chance at Sam. And it tried to kill a kid, even though it couldn't've fed from it."

Frowning, Ellie looked down at her sandwich. "You think that might be typical?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "But it saw us, Ellie, both of us. If we go out there tonight, it might figure it's a good opportunity to get rid of us?"

Wadding up the wrapping paper from her food, Ellie nodded agreement, getting to her feet and tossing the wrappings in the trash can.

"You got the last one somewhere near the Ramble, didn't you?" she asked him, stretching the kinks out of her neck and shoulders.

"Yeah, that little wooded section."

"Two bodies were found in the Bird Sanctuary, we should probably stake that out too," she said, going to the sofa and dropping onto it.

"How's the shoulder?" he asked, finishing his sub and getting up from the table.

"Good," Ellie said, letting herself topple onto her side. "I'm going to crash for a while, you should too."

He nodded, opening the fridge and getting out another beer. It was just past noon, they could sleep until after dark. The room was heating up again, not a breath coming in through the gap in the windows and he yawned, carrying his beer to the bed and putting it onto the nightstand, then pulling off his boots.

She hadn't mentioned anything about the tension that he'd felt, that he'd thought they'd both felt, when he'd used Pamela's cream on her shoulder. The thought zipped through his mind as he lay back on the bed, pushing the pillows up against the bedhead. He'd thought he'd seen a reaction, but maybe he hadn't, maybe he'd just imagined it. Picking up the beer, he turned his head to look at the sofa.

_You don't need anyone._

He tried not to need anyone, he admitted to himself. Everyone he'd needed had died … or left. He'd tried not to need anyone or want anyone because it was easier than waiting for them to see the missing parts, to notice the stains he could feel on his soul, to put them into danger just being around. He tried not to need or want anyone because he couldn't keep losing people. Every one had torn a piece from him when they'd gone and sooner or later, he thought, there wouldn't be anything left but the corrupted parts, the parts he was afraid to look at.

_I guess I'm not the man either of our dads wanted me to be._

Tessa was right, the thought cutting through him. There were no second chances and nothing good was coming to him. He was never going to be the man he'd wanted to be.

On the sofa, Ellie shifted a little, half-turning and he turned away, putting the bottle back on the nightstand and closing his eyes.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

* * *

Under the counter of the kitchen facilities, the small, old fridge grumbled and burped and rattled, its motor slowly overheating as it struggled to keep its interior cool against the heat accumulating in the room.

Dean woke slowly, hot and with the press of the unmoving air close against his skin, a tantalisingly muffled scent of food and the stronger smell of fresh, real coffee filling his nostrils. He rolled onto his side and opened an eye, squinting at his watch and wiping at the slimy perspiration that was coating the back of his neck.

"Who turned up the goddamned heat?" he mumbled peevishly as the sheet clung to him and he peeled it away.

He heard a soft snort from the other side of the dim room, blinking as Ellie turned on the lamp.

"Dinner," she said, putting a couple of foil-wrapped objects down in front of him, along with a tall cup of steaming coffee.

"Where'd you get this?"

"Burger place a couple of blocks up," she said. "The coffee's from the Italians down the street."

"Heaven," he said under his breath, prising off the lid and inhaling the smell.

"Nightmares still about Hell?"

His gaze jerked up involuntarily, the cup arrested halfway between the table and his mouth. "What nightmares?"

Ellie smiled slightly, one brow arched as she sat down at the small table and looked over her cardboard container at him.

He looked back at his coffee, lifting it and scalding his tongue as he swallowed a big mouthful. It was why he didn't like to sleep in front of anyone else, sometimes not even his brother. Most of his armour seemed to just fall away when he slept, and Sammy had made it clear that the nightmares were obvious. On the increasingly rare occasions he'd actually managed to hook up, he left long before the night was over, emptied out and watching the woman fall asleep and slipping away unnoticed. _Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies_, he'd told himself.

The last couple of nights, they hadn't come and he'd kidded himself that maybe that was done, his subconscious having explored every conceivable variation on the theme and over it. It could've been the heat that brought them back, he thought, unwrapping the burger and starting to eat.

The dreams weren't just about Hell, of course. Not any more. Now they were a mash-up of everything that had followed his reprieve from the pit as well. Everything that had torn holes and cut gouges out of him in the last few months. He glanced at Ellie from under his brows, wondering uncomfortably if he'd said anything out loud the previous night.

"You can't bury it all, you know," Ellie said diffidently, sipping her coffee, her gaze on the TV set, watching the flickering images crossing the screen, the sound off.

"Can give it the good ol' college try," he replied around a mouthful of burger.

"You didn't go to college," she reminded him gently, turning to look at him. "It won't stay buried, Dean. It can't. There isn't enough booze in the world to stop it and you can't drink enough to cut the pain or you'll get too sloppy anyway."

He knew that. He could feel his memories, his doubts and his fears, pressing harder at him every single day. He knew the line he could blur it all down to, without fucking up his reactions and instincts, but it wasn't enough, wasn't anywhere close to what it would actually take to shut down the noise.

"How do you do it?" he asked, looking down at the burger in his hands.

"Mostly? Just talk to someone," she said. "Someone I trust."

It was on the tip of his tongue to say that he didn't have anyone he could trust, he didn't need to talk about it, he could deal with his crap on his own. _You don't need anyone_. And he realised he was lying to himself and about to lie to her.

"This, uh, maybe isn't such a good time to get into this," he said instead, putting the burger down and picking up his coffee.

"No," Ellie agreed readily. "Probably not."

Putting down her cup, she picked up the map of the park and spread it over the table. At some point through the night, she'd marked it up and he looked at the red dots, centred over two main locations.

"What do you got?" he asked, relieved that the conversation had been shelved, unsure of why he hadn't vetoed it completely. He'd stonewalled his brother enough times on the subject.

"These are the locations of the bodies in the park, over the last two months," Ellie said, turning the map around as he got off the bed and walked across to the table. "Two distinct areas."

"Two distinct monsters," he said, dropping into the other chair and leaning over it. "Which one do you want to take first?"

"I was thinking we could take one each," she said.

Dean looked at her, repressing a fast shiver that snaked down his spine. The reaction was accompanied by an itch at the back of his neck. She was probably right, he thought. Going after them separately, they could probably bag 'em both by dawn. The itch persisted, but he didn't know why. "We could take one tonight, together. Get the other one tomorrow."

She shook her head. "And let someone else die tonight?"

He turned away without answering.

She looked over at him, one eyebrow raised. "We've both hunted these things solo. What are you worried about?"

"I don't know," he said. "Just a feeling."

"We can't risk another death."

"Yeah. I know."

It was just a feeling, he thought, finishing his coffee and pitching the container into the trash can. A strong, clamouring feeling, not enough to ping his internal alarms, but enough to make him squirm in discomfort.

"That one's pie," Ellie said, and he turned back to the table, glancing at the second foil-wrapped shape. "Apple and blueberry."

"You got me pie?"

She grinned at the look on his face as he picked it up and unwrapped the foil covering. "Doesn't mean we're engaged or anything."

His response was unintelligible through the mouthful of pastry and fruit filling, and he rolled his eyes at her instead.

* * *

The broad asphalt path was fitfully lit by short, gas-styled lamps along its length. Even at the beginning, Ellie could see that quite a few of the lights were missing from the twisting string, and she slowed down a little, half-closing her eyes to adjust to the lower levels of light.

Around the park, the city hummed, out of sight but reminding her of its immense presence. Muffled and distorted by the vegetation that grew rampantly in the warm months, the constant noise was distant, the urgency of the beeps, sirens and roar of traffic muted.

She strolled along the path, the flashlight hidden by the lightweight jacket over her arm, senses stretched out through the warm darkness, the sound of her bootheels clocking softly along the pavement.

It might not've been the best time to raise the nightmares, she considered, ducking her head as she remembered his reaction. On the other hand, he hadn't closed up like a clam. There'd been a willingness in his eyes, she'd felt, to at least entertain the idea of letting some of the poisons that filled him out.

_You didn't try hard enough_, he'd said and she'd known that was true. Trapped between wanting to force him into seeing what was going on and being afraid that he'd shut her out completely, she'd given up and let it go, only to lose his trust anyway. What she'd thrown back at him had come from guilt and an anger at herself, for being gutless and thinking there'd be a better time, a better place to tell him. He'd always been a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of guy, and she'd known even at the time that his anger had been masking the fear of what he'd done, what he'd become, fear for what it'd all meant. She shouldn't have reacted. Should've let it go.

_Could've, would've, should've – it was done now_, she told herself sharply, glancing around as she came to the Lake and began to skirt its edge. She had another chance, maybe. She wouldn't chicken out again.

A faint noise, further up the path, caught at her attention and she stopped, relaxing as she saw three young men come into sight. All three were in their late teens, she noted absently as they passed under a path light, slouching along with their jeans hanging off their hips and hands in their pockets, a steady stream of good-natured insults passing between them.

The ribbing stopped as they drew closer and Ellie kept her pace, ignoring the considering looks.

"Hol' up, lady, no need to be in a rush," the closest said and she turned to look at him.

"Move along, boys, nothing for you here tonight," she said quietly, unobtrusively positioning herself as they came to a halt in a loose half-circle to one side of the path.

"Sez you," the boy in the middle told her, wide mouth curving into a sneering smile. "Could be plenty for us."

"Not a game you want to play."

"You let us be judge of the games we play or don't play." The boy at the front was the tallest, broad-shouldered under his hoodie.

The badge had taken Freddie four weeks to replicate but it was worth every penny, Ellie thought as she pulled it from under the neckline of her top, the gold flashing in the lamplight. New York's finest, even the badge number was authentic.

"How 'bout we make this easy and you just keep moving?"

"You here on your ownsome, honey," the middle boy said, taking a step closer, his expression dismissing the tin. "Don't see no backup."

Letting the badge drop, Ellie's hand darted beneath her jacket, reappearing an eyeblink later with her automatic in it. It was a SIG Sauer 226, not quite the 239 that were issued to the cops in NYC but close enough to make the boys all take a step back.

"Don't make the mistake of your lives," she told him, her tone flat.

The boy at the back grabbed his friend and pulled him away, both of them moving down the path a little. The leader stared at her, his eyes hard.

"We can get guns too, y'know," he said, lifting his chin a little. "We can get _lots_ of guns if we want."

"I'm sure you can," she said, the cock of the hammer loud in the quiet woods. "But for right now? You gonna let me do my job, or you gonna fuck up my night with paperwork?"

_God, go Dirty Harriet_, she thought derisively, but it made the boy laugh, in spite of himself.

"No, officer, you gotta do what you gotta do," he said, turning away but watching her over his shoulder. "Hate to fuck up your night!"

Ellie kept the gun levelled and cocked until they were out of sight, around the curve of the lake's edge, then she uncocked it and thumbed on the safety, sliding it back into the cutaway holster under the overhang of her top.

_One to tell Dean_, she decided, turning back to the path. He'd laugh his ass off.

* * *

Close to the lights of W59th, even hidden in the growth of the sanctuary, Dean found he could see clearly. The night air was as warm and sticky and as filled with insect life as it'd been the last time he'd been out here, and he tugged at his shirt collar in irritation, slapping futilely at the mosquitoes that had homed in on him as soon he'd made his way to the head of the Pond.

He was thirty yards from the small body of water, about five from the closest path and not more than ten from where the last body had been found, hidden from the lights in a small copse of trees, and he could hear the murmur of the people who were strolling through the warm, summer night clearly despite the proximity to the street traffic.

_Too many people_, he thought, sliding down the soft bank a bit further. A couple walked past him, arguing amiably over a film just seen. _Normal life_. That didn't include monsters, or hiding in the shrubbery waiting for them … or nightmares about a place that wasn't supposed to exist …

She'd taken him by surprise with the question. As usual, he thought disparagingly. It probably shouldn't've, considering that Sam had been on his case about them since he'd gotten out. More surprising had been the small personal revelation that he might want to talk about it – maybe – with someone. Someone who didn't think he was weak for fearing what he'd become. Someone he could trust.

"No, Eric, that's not what happened!"

A woman's strident voice came up the path and Dean hunched a little deeper into the shadows.

"You never even wanted this life." A man's deeper voice argued and he saw them come into view beneath the screen of bushes. "You've bitched about it since we started. Why didn't you just tell me the truth?!"

"You wouldn't understand, you never listen to me!"

The couple stopped a few yards from him, and he fidgeted uncomfortably.

"I never lied to you," the man said. "I never betrayed you."

"No," she agreed instantly. "You were just perpetually disappointed in me!"

"That's not true."

"That's what it looked like to me," she snapped, turning and walking away.

_Normal life_. Other peoples' lives. Not so godamned different. Trust was something he'd relied on. Trust in his family, in the friends they'd had. And it was possible that it didn't really matter what had broken it, only that it was broken and he didn't know how to put the pieces back together. Didn't even know where to start.

Twisting onto his side, he closed his eyes, listening to the guy hurrying after the woman, his voice fading away. He had been disappointed in Sam, he knew. He'd done his utmost to understand what his little brother had gone through, had told himself that Sam had been alone when his deal had come due, but the truth was that he didn't understand. Not really. It wasn't something he could've ever done, or even imagine doing, putting someone else ahead of his family. _Semper Fi_. His father had set it into his bones.

When he'd followed Sam that night, and seen him pulling the demons out, using the powers of his mind, Ruby hovering in the background, he'd felt Hell close around him again, the razor blade slicing and dicing through his organs. He'd made the deal so that Sam could be free, could go live a normal life. Ruby had told him otherwise. Even Ellie had told him that it wouldn't end there. But he'd hoped that Sam could fight on with Bobby, with the other hunters. Not with the demon.

It'd been a stupid hope and a stupid decision but he knew he'd make the same deal again. He couldn't've let Sam die. Not if there was a way around it.

A lot of things had broken in him, in Hell, and in the last few months. A lot of things had changed the way he'd looked at the world, at himself, at his brother. He didn't know if leaving Sam was the best choice he could've made. Maybe, if Sam hadn't thought he needed the time as well, he couldn't've done it. He didn't know if he could face his little brother, see all those things between them. It couldn't ever be what it had been, but the more he'd thought about that, the more he'd realised that the memories, of family and friends, of having something solid to get his back against, had been distorted by what he'd felt, by what he'd needed. The reality had been different.

Footsteps and a chattering group of people coming up the path broke through his uneasy thoughts and he rubbed a hand over his face, opening his eyes and forcing the mess in his head back down behind the walls that felt like they were bulging outwards more and more every day. He would deal with it later, he half-heartedly promised himself. After the job. This job. The next job. Sometime.

There were too many people here, he thought again, rolling back to look under the bracken and shrubs at the group passing by. It would be too hard for the monster to call out, to lure one of them deeper into the shadows if there was no one here on their own. He wondered if the crocottas would try anyway. Maybe they would, but probably not here. Somewhere more secluded.

Like _the Ramble_.

The thought made him sit up straighter. The section of the park was usually avoided for more prosaic reasons than monsters, its tangle of paths and wooded areas favoured for shooting up, for clandestine trysts in the woods around the lake, condoms and needles and syringes littering the area through the warmer months. For the random crime, assault and muggings and rapes, for which the city had a waning reputation, but was still a real and occasional danger.

As if the thought had brought it on, the back of his neck began to prickle and twitch. Rolling to his feet, he felt an icy flush chill the perspiration that soaked him and he pushed his way through the bushes to the path, accelerating into a jog as he headed north.

* * *

"Ellie … help."

The voice was instantly recognisable, and Ellie swung around on the path, knowing it had to be a trick, knowing it wasn't real. Dean was on the other side of the park, watching the Pond and the sanctuary.

The movement, in the corner of her eye, was as subtle as a cobweb and Ellie turned fast, her jacket falling back, the flashlight rising as the man stepped out from behind the tree and lunged forward.

She ducked the closed fist that grazed one cheek, her knees sagging to take her under his grasping fingers, thumb finding the flashlight's switch and flicking it on as she reached for the long, slender blade sheathed along her forearm with her other hand. The beam swung wildly around, invisible over the monster's clothing, crumbling the flesh of a briefly exposed wrist as the crocotta regained its balance and took a long stride closer.

Its face contorted in rage and pain and she backed fast, her knife in one hand, the jacket thrown clear, raising the flashlight's barrel to catch it higher, where the creature's head and neck were not protected by fabric. A sudden tearing pain in her scalp was the only warning she had that there was more than one.

Her hair was yanked down hard, the creature's fingers digging through it and pulling her over backwards, a hand curling around her throat and pressing hard into the artery at the side, cutting off the blood flow to her brain. The crocotta in front of her gave a breathy chuckle as it pulled the flashlight from her hand and threw it aside, reaching for her wrist, one finger driving into the joint of her thumb, her knife falling as her hand was forced open and her vision began to dim.

"What gives you the right to hunt us down?" a man's voice breathed against her ear and she was pulled back against his chest, her face lifting as he tugged on her hair. "Arrogant, self-appointed judge, jury and executioners, all of you, not even knowing what it is you hunt!"

She couldn't refute that, Ellie acknowledged remotely, struggling to keep consciousness as the hand tightened around her neck. There was nothing in the lore about crocottas working together, although adaptability was the key to any species survival and perhaps she and Dean had pushed the change in behaviour onto these two by killing off all the rest.

She felt the hands of the monster in front of her touch her face, and she twisted away, lifting a knee hard into its groin, stamping down with her body weight on its instep as it grunted and doubled-over. The hand around her throat squeezed and Ellie felt it crushing her windpipe, the crocotta behind her, releasing her hair, its arm swinging around her ribs and lifting her up a little, the heel of its hand compressing her diaphragm.

_Don't black out_, she told herself furiously, going limp against the creature's grip and sucking in a thin breath.

In front of her, the crocotta wheezed as it straightened up and reached for her face again, fingers clamping like talons around her jaw. Through half-open eyes, she saw its jaw unhinge, revealing a mouthful of pointed teeth that seemed to grow as the mouth opened wider and wider. Living or dead, it would suck her soul if she couldn't think of a way to stop it. The thought bounced agitatedly around in her head but she couldn't move, couldn't lift her hand to stop it. Its fingers forced her mouth open and she stared helplessly at the red-tinted eyes of the monster, feeling her energy drained, fatigue weighting her muscles and flashes of images, from memory, from the past, clouding her mind.

_Dean, his eyes widening and mouth dropping open in surprise at her question. The iron-like feel of his rigid muscles under her hand. Green eyes, darkened with pain, cutting away. Michael, his face contorted by the demon possessing him, looming over her and the demon's taunts in her ears._

Distantly, she realised that the crocottas didn't only target grief, but memory. Grief was probably just the easiest to drive people into their waiting arms. She was drowning, she thought, drowning in memories that she didn't even consciously remember.

_The fierce bright pain of the vampire's bite, and the rush of heated air as the man had run into the building, a blazing torch setting the old timber factory alight. Exhausted and aching, Carter showing her how much stronger a man was in a fight, how much faster she needed to be if she was going to survive. Pain. Unbearable agony and a face above hers, green eyes bright with unshed tears, strong hands holding her in place. You'll have to hold onto her, Dean, hold her tight. This is going to hurt. A wind that had swept into the cabin and torn them to pieces, right in front of her. An empty house, the fires almost out in the big hearths, the tree sparkling with a mountain of presents under it and an envelope on the mantle. You'll be going to a very good school, a boarding school. We're busy. Later. Go away._

* * *

"Dean … help me, please."

Dean slowed as he reached the first patch of deeper shadows, under the trees. The voice hit him like a sledgehammer and he ground his teeth together as he moved more cautiously along the narrow, twisting trail. It could be her, but it wasn't likely. Even if she were injured, he had the feeling she'd drag herself clear rather than ask for help like that.

"Dean … don't let them kill me …"

Not far, a few yards to his north and west, he thought, his hand tightening around the haft of the switchblade he held.

"Dean …"

He accelerated as his ears picked up the muffled snap of a soft twig, going wide of the small clump of saplings in front of him and diving and rolling as he caught the shadow in his periphery. The shadow gasped as it tripped over his legs and he was jacknifing upright, one hand catching the shoulder and wrenching the man over, the other lifting the switchblade, raising it higher and plunging it into the base of the neck. The creature arched back, jerking and convulsing against his grip, its feet digging into the soft decayed leaves and bark that covered the ground.

When it stopped moving, he rolled the body off his legs and got to his feet, absently wiping the blade on the hem of his coat as he debated the pros and cons of trying to find Ellie in the dark or calling out to her and risking attracting attention he didn't want.

"Dean …"

He flinched at her voice, unexpected and confirming what he'd known, on a subconscious level, even before they'd left the hotel. Both monsters were here. One of them had her.

"Ellie, where are you?" he called out, the split-second decision to confront the thing head on driving him forward.

"Dean, help me … it's here … I'm dying …"

_Or dead_, the small voice in his head piped up cruelly. He ignored it, eyes half-closed as he let his ears triangulate the best guess position of the creature imitating her. Ten yards ahead, maybe one or two to the left, he thought. He skirted the outcropping boulders, going wide to the left, hoping to approach the crocotta on a more oblique angle and unseen.

A crackle in the undergrowth ahead and to his right suggested that it wasn't going to wait for him to find it first. He froze, shoulder pressed against the narrow trunk of an ash, and saw the flicker of movement behind the scattered piles of small rocks and rounded stones that marked the watercourse leading down to the lake. A second later, there was a faint splash.

Dean inched around the tree's bole, his gaze unfocussed as he looked for movement. The thud of a footfall twitched his attention further right and he saw it, creeping through the hip-high ferns that mantled the larger rock outcroppings, heading away from him.

He followed silently, too far to risk running and alerting it, every sense stretched out and razor-keen as he tracked it along the almost-invisible thin trail that led back to the clearing where the other one was lying dead. He might have a shot when it hit that clearing, he thought, extending his stride a little more to keep it in sight. One moment of shock when it saw the body. Otherwise, it was going to be a straight fight in the dark. And probably, he realised with a sour grin, its night-time vision was going to be a helluva better than his.

The shadow vanished into the dark beneath the trees ringing the clearing and Dean sped up, the soft humus of the forest floor silencing his steps, the exact position of the trail fixed in his mind. He looked up as the trees thinned and saw it, crouched over the body of the other one, and he dragged in a deep breath and leapt forward, covering the distance in a long, single stride.

The crocotta swung around a second before he reached it, its face twisted up and the jaw already dropping, the city's ambient light glistening a little on the saliva coating the sharp teeth. Then he was dropping, one knee hitting the monster's shoulder and knocking him backwards onto the ground, his free hand slamming, heel-first, into the bridge of its nose as he plunged the stiletto blade through the open mouth, aimed down its gullet.

No one ever said that the blade had to sever the neck-spine joint from the outside, he thought, rocking his weight over the haft and feeling the tip grind through bone another inch into the thing's neck. It was trembling in a fast, staccato rhythm under him, eyes opened wide as it stared past him into the night, the unnatural width of the jaw action allowing him to push the blade further until he felt something give way at the tip and the shaking ceased abruptly.

Dean leaned back, pulling the knife out and wiping the blade on the monster's shirt. In the morning, the sunlight would disintegrate the bodies, leaving the clothing in a pile filled with dust. It might present a conundrum for the cops, but at least there would be no more murders in the park.

Getting to his feet, he turned away and walked back along the trail, crossing the small stream and pulling out his flashlight. In the soft ground, the tracks of the monster were clear, a man's size ten running shoe, the zigzag tread pattern distinctive.

They led up the small hillside and across a stretch of open ground, dropping again into the woods on the other side, and the flashlight beam caught the bright red of her hair first, vivid against the dark ground and the trunks of the trees. Her face was turned away from him, and the loose sprawl of her body made his stomach tighten as he broke into a run.

Dropping to his knees beside her, he looked down, hesitating as he lifted his hand to turn her head toward him. Too many people had died. He'd lost too many people he cared about to want to see for sure if she was one more of them.

"You were right," she said, making him jump as she rolled her head slowly toward him.

"Damned fucking straight I was right," he snapped, swallowing hard at the sudden banging of his pulse at the base of his throat. "You should'a listened to me."

"Don't yell at me, Dean," she said, eyes opening.

He frowned a little. The pupils were blown, her gaze unfocussed. "You okay?"

"Not just emotion," she said. "Memories."

"What?"

"So tired."

He watched her eyes drop closed again, and leaned closer to her, one hand slipping under her hair to feel for the carotid artery in her neck. Her pulse was strong but slow.

"Ellie, don't pass out on me," he said, dropping the flashlight on the ground as he slid an arm under her shoulders and lifted her. She was breathing, but like her pulse, her chest rose and fell slowly. "Come on, we'll get back to the hotel, you can tell me all about it, then you can crash. Okay?"

"S'like the djinn," she mumbled and he stared at her.

"What's like the djinn?"

"What happened?"

"Hoping you could tell me that," he said, forcing her into a sitting position. "C'mon, snap out of it."

"Out of what?"

It was like talking to his little brother when Sam'd had a snoutful, he thought caustically. He kept his grip on her and levered himself up, dragging her up with him.

"We're gonna walk for a bit," he told her, shifting his flashlight to his left hand as he got her arm over his shoulders. As the beam played around the ground wildly, he saw the UV flashlight lying under a bush, and a second later, the gleam of her slender knife from under another. Half-carrying, half-dragging her over to them, he managed to get low enough to retrieve the flashlight, then the knife, shoving them through his belt as he shifted his grip on her again.

"Ellie, can you walk?" he asked, feeling her weight sagging from the fulcrum of her shoulder as he turned around.

"Don' think so," she sighed.

"_Sonofa_ – Alright," he said, more to himself, he realised, than for her benefit. He crouched and caught both wrists in one hand, letting her fold over his shoulder. She didn't weight that much and he'd move a helluva lot quicker this way, the state she was in.

Like a djinn, she'd said, the words coming back as he picked his way down the hill toward the lake. Like the poison of a djinn, he wondered? Was that what happened to the victims, they got lost in their heads and just let the monsters suck out their souls?

The car was down near the Pond. He hoped he wouldn't see too many people on the way there.

* * *

"It was like the djinn's poison, sort of," Ellie said, her head bent over her notes, spread over half the table, her hair still tangled and snarled, mostly pulled out of its braid, damp in the sultry heat of the room as she wrote.

Dean looked at her, chewing his burger. It'd taken three cups of espresso, more or less force-fed and a burger to get her out of the half-comatose state she'd been in when he'd managed to get them both to the car and then back to the hotel. He didn't remember how long the djinn's effects had lasted on him, but he remembered the hangover the following day, those false memories as vivid and real as any of his others.

"They could be related," he offered as he swallowed, picking up his beer and washing the food down. "What did you see?"

"It wasn't like seeing," Ellie told him distractedly, lifting her head, her gaze losing focus as she thought about it. "Or, at least, it was feeling as much as seeing," she clarified. "It was like it was rummaging through my mind, through my memories, looking for the ones that meant the most … the most painful, the ones that hit me the hardest."

She shook her head. "I don't know if I can describe that part, maybe it would be different for someone else, but I couldn't get out of it, couldn't push them aside and see what was happening at that moment."

An expression twisted her features a little, and he wondered what memories had been stirred up. Too many bad ones, he thought. A slight shiver trickled down his spine at the thought of the monsters grabbing him and forcing him to look at the memories he had locked away. The nightmares were more than enough.

She turned her head to look at him, and he saw her eyes refocus. "I told you to trust your instincts."

He snorted. "You're the one who should be trusting my damned instincts," he countered irritably. "I was the one who said we should've stuck together."

"You're right," Ellie agreed immediately.

"Got that right, I'm right," he told her, the irritation dissipating when no argument was forthcoming. "Next time, I expect you to listen when I tell you something."

"Next time," she repeated, her mouth curving up in a one-sided grin. "Yep, sure thing. Next time."

He watched her look back at her notes. "You think the two of them were working together just because we were here?"

"My gut says, yeah, they teamed up to take us out," she replied, opening her laptop and starting to transcribe the notes into a file. "They didn't seem to be that comfortable with each other."

"And they weren't clear on the plan?"

Shaking her head, Ellie said, "No. One of them wanted to kill me straight away, the other one insisted that it wait for you to show up. I don't remember much more than that, because I started to fade out around then, but it wasn't like they'd decided anything beforehand."

"Are you sending this stuff to Bobby?"

"And Rufus," she confirmed, fingers flying across the keys. "Bobby'll pass it on to the hunters he knows, at least."

Finishing his food and the beer on the table, Dean got to his feet and dropped the bottle and wrappings in the trash can, turning to the fridge and pulling out another beer from its semi-cool interior. There wasn't much in the way of lore on the creatures and maybe what they'd seen here would help other hunters. Or maybe not, he thought, knocking the top off the bottle and swallowing a mouthful as he walked back to the table.

"Whose voice did you hear, when it called out?" he asked. He picked up the chair and turned it around, sitting down and leaning forward, his hand loosely curled around the beer as he looked at her.

She didn't answer for a moment, and he wondered if that was a deliberate hesitation, or if she was just distracted by what she was typing.

"Uh, I heard my mom's voice," she said, glancing at him then back to the keyboard. "What about you?"

He looked down at the bottle. "Sam," he told her, his voice a little higher than usual. It was harder to lie to her than it was to lie to his brother, he thought in annoyance.

"Oh."

The lore on the crocottas was that they could see pretty much everything, could reach into your mind and pick and choose the most potent memories and images, the ones you couldn't easily defend against. It could be wrong, he decided, lifting the bottle and letting another mouthful of the cool liquid trickle down his throat.

"There another beer in there?" Ellie asked, glancing sideways at the fridge.

"Uh, yeah, sure," he said, getting to his feet and finishing his as he crossed to the counter. He dropped the empty into the trash can and pulled out two cold ones, knocking the tops off and handing her one as he walked over to the bed.

"Doesn't the heat ever let up here?" he grumbled, setting the bottle on the nightstand and sitting on the bed to pull off his boots. "It feels like its getting hotter."

From the table, Ellie huffed out a small laugh. "Not without a storm."

"Bring on the storms then," he muttered, pulling his tee shirt off and flopping backwards onto the bed, sighing a little as a trickle of cooler air slid over him from the open gap of the window.

"There's a very, very small breeze here," he informed her, reaching out for his beer and turning his head to look at her.

"Really?" Ellie looked up from the laptop and pushed back a strand of hair that was sticking to her forehead. She looked back at the screen with a slight scowl and he heard the soft clicking of the keys speed up. "Don't talk about it, it might get shy and disappear."

He smiled, leaning back against the pillows and closing his eyes. "You think we got all of 'em?"

"I don't know," she said. "A city like this? It's almost perfect for them. Most of the deaths might be thought of as misadventure, or even accidental death, random crime, some might be flagged missing persons … nothing like that is going to be seen as a pattern, not even by the best cops."

"Yeah." He turned his head, opening his eyes and watching her as she finished typing and sent the files to the other hunters. "They were pretty blatant about it night before last, maybe we'll see something on the news."

Closing the laptop lid, Ellie nodded. She slid the computer into its bag and stood up, stretching. "Tell that breeze not to go anywhere," she said over her shoulder. "I'm going to try and cool down enough to enjoy it."

Walking to the sofa, she put the laptop's bag at the end, and pulled out a couple of things from her bag, then headed for the bathroom. A moment later, he heard the water go on, and he rolled off the bed, going to the television set and turning it on, the cool, flickering light enough to see by, the sound low enough to hear but not drown out the other sounds in the room. He turned off the lights, left the lamp on near the armchair on and resettled himself on the bed, shifting uncomfortably for a few minutes until he found the little zephyr of breeze, even the thin, old denim of his jeans close and too warm in the stifling room.

The cooler air moving over him drew a little of the heat from his skin and he closed his eyes, tuning out the tv broadcast, images forming behind his closed lids, centred around the faintly heard gush of water from the bathroom. His breath whistled softly through his teeth as they formed into a single image, one that throbbed through his body as well as his mind and he wondered, a little incoherently, what Ellie would do if he walked into the bathroom, stripped off and got in there with her.

_C'mon_, he thought, rolling onto one shoulder and shutting both thought and its accompanying imagery away. _Things weren't complicated enough?_ He had to add _that_ to the mix? She wasn't a pick up, some nameless chick he could walk away from and never see again. He swiped his hand over his face and reached out for the beer. The fact was, he told himself, pushing himself higher against the pillows, it didn't matter what he felt, he wasn't going to screw up one of the few relationships he had with someone he could trust. _Get your head back in the game_. He turned up the sound on the tv a bit more and forced himself to concentrate on the news reader.

The taps went off and Ellie came out of the bathroom, dressed in the thin white singlet and cotton boxers. He glanced at her as she walked to the side of the bed, watching her hold out her hand toward the gap in the window and sigh with relief when she felt the light air moving over it. He moved over as far he could, and waved a hand at the television.

"Nothing so far."

Lying down on the bed under the window, Ellie's gaze sharpened on the set.

"Might not mean anything," she said, leaning on one elbow to lift her damp hair from the back of her neck and spread it over the pillow behind her.

Dean's gaze involuntarily followed the movement, watching the muscles flex in her upper arm and shoulder, wandering down the shoulder to the swell of her breast beneath the thin material of her singlet, flattening out over her stomach. He was discomforted to find that her scent was carrying on the light air that moved over them, awakening the sense memory of her body pressed tightly against his in the subway. He shifted slightly and looked back at the television, forcing himself to concentrate on what the reporters at the scene were saying, ignoring the feel of his pulse beating in the hollow of his throat.

They watched in silence to the end of the update, both relaxing incrementally when there was no mention of any crime occurring in the city that could have been attributed to the crocottas. Ellie gave a sigh of relief, stretching out and closing her eyes.

Beside her, Dean lifted his beer, swallowing a mouthful. "Could be that they haven't had time to find any other bodies yet?"

"Could be," she agreed. "Could be that if there was one or two still out there, they're keeping a low profile since the others have been killed."

"Not likely," he decided, rolling onto one elbow and looking down at her. With her eyes closed, he let his gaze slip down her body, knowing it was a bad idea, unable to help himself. "Two of them hooked up to get us - more of them and they'd probably have succeeded."

"Good point," Ellie said, smiling slightly. "We'll check in the morning," she added, opening her eyes and turning her head to him.

"I guess we could hang around for a couple of days, make sure," he said, liking the idea of that. Not hunting, just hanging out. Maybe catching a movie, or checking out a club. Regular folks, on vacation.

"Shouldn't take that long," Ellie said, wriggling to the side of the bed and sitting up. "I don't suppose those windows open any more than that?"

He shook his head. "Not without demolition."

"What a shame." She got up and walked back to the sofa, tossing the thin sheet to one end. Watching her, Dean chewed at the corner of his lower lip. He shouldn't've let that damned thought in to begin with, he realised, 'cause it was giving him hell about leaving.

"Six of them in three days," he said suddenly. "It's not bad."

"Not bad at all," Ellie agreed absently, dropping to the sofa and dragging her bag over to her feet.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

* * *

Dean watched her duck her head as she searched the bag, the light gleaming on her hair, burnished copper, spilling over her shoulders. He was nervous, he thought uncomfortably, with no idea of exactly what it was he was nervous about.

"We should, uh, go out … celebrate or something," he continued, not sure where he was trying to go with this line of thought, but feeling the need to do something, something semi-normal, something that other people might do if a job went reasonably well. He thought of the little restaurant with the incredible steaks and realised belatedly that he wanted a repeat of that, just talking. Just being with someone he could be himself with.

"Sure," Ellie said, nodding distractedly. "Tomorrow, okay?"

"Uh …" he hesitated for a moment. "What's wrong with now?"

Ellie looked up, raising a brow at him. "You'll have to celebrate on your own, then," she said. "Sorry, I hate to be a party-pooper, but I'm seriously done."

He squashed the moment of disappointment, shaking his head. "S'okay, we can do it tomorrow," he told her lightly, looking at his watch. It was past three a.m. anyway.

It'd been her voice, out there in the park tonight, and he wasn't enough of a liar to try and tell himself that he hadn't been fighting his fears that he was going to get there too late. That was a part of the restless itch he could feel , he thought uncomfortably. Another part was the mix of anticlimax and relief that the end of any job brought, both of them still alive, a feeling that they shouldn't take that for granted, should get out there and do something, feel something to mark the occasion. He was tired too, he knew. The restlessness was just more powerful than the tiredness was.

He finished his beer and looked at the bathroom.

"You leave any hot water?" he asked, getting to his feet and lobbing the bottle into the trash.

"Didn't use any hot," she told him cheerfully, pulling out a comb and running it through her hair.

Cold shower. Maybe that would take the fizz out of his blood, he thought, closing the bathroom door behind him. It was hot enough that the idea held a certain appeal, in one way, if not others. He pulled off his jeans and stepped into the tub. The scent of her soap, or shampoo, wafted around him and he reached for the cold tap, turning it on full, shivering at first as he shifted under the torrential flow of water then revelling in the way it sucked the heat from his skin, sluiced the dried sweat from his hair and body. Tipping his head back and closing his eyes, he let the water thunder over him, driving thought and feeling out completely.

Whether it was the beers or the shower, or the final letting go of the tensions of the last couple of days, he didn't know, but most of the restless feeling was gone when he turned the water off and got out, pulling his towel from the hook behind the door and drying off.

He could wait 'til tomorrow to go and do something normal, he decided, brushing his teeth and running impatient fingers through his hair to get it lying more or less the way it was supposed to. He could keep the flickers of arousal that still sparked through his nervous system under control. He could pretend that it was business as usual, nothing had changed, nothing was going to change, it was all good, here in the 'hood.

Opening the door, he saw that Ellie was already curled up on the sofa, the television off, the lamp on the nightstand still on for him. He'd forgotten to take anything clean into the bathroom with him and he padded on bare feet across the floor, feeling the grit in the carpet beneath his soles with a grimace of distaste, the towel wrapped around his hips flapping against his knees.

Glancing at the sofa, he found a clean pair of boxers in his duffel and dropped the towel, pulling them on next to the bed. He threw the towel over the chair and flopped onto the bed, reaching over to turn off the lamp.

The room wasn't dark. Not with the ambient light of the city shining in through the uncovered windows. He could see the furniture, could see Ellie lying on her side, the light sheet that was partly drawn over her rising and falling from shoulder down to waist, and up to hip, then scrunched up over her legs, her bare feet vaguely visible at the end of the sofa.

Lying on his side, he looked at that landscape and let his thoughts drift.

_It could've gone bad_, he thought uneasily. If the monsters had decided to kill her as soon as they'd gotten her, he would've been too late to do anything. He hadn't pushed the warning feeling he'd gotten because he hadn't wanted to think about it too much. He would've listened to it if it'd been Sam he'd been hunting with, or probably anyone else, he admitted unwillingly. He'd've pushed anyone else. And what the hell did that mean? If she'd died tonight, it would've been another death on his head, blood on his hands, because he hadn't … because he hadn't wanted to seem like he was … _what?_ Worrying about her? _Feeling_ anything for her?

He rolled over, restless again at the thought. Was he, he wondered? Feeling something for her that was more than just a colleague, more than just the pretty damned normal responses any red-blooded male might have spending this much time this close to her?

Images crowded his mind's eye, flashes from the past few days that seemed contradictory – the way she'd looked in the bar that first night, almost unrecognisable, sparking a reaction that he hadn't acknowledged then but which flooded through him again now; the limp sprawl of her body in the park when his flashlight had picked out the blaze of her hair; her face bare, freckles just visible, in the long tee shirt, looking too young, until she smiled; a smooth shoulder, colouring with bruises, and over it, as he'd spread the cream across her skin, he'd seen the swelling curve of her breast from above, barely covered by the low neck of the singlet pulled down at one side – but weren't.

Pieces of someone he'd known for a while. Pieces that kept spinning him around, not sure of the emotions they were conjuring. Pieces that he thought he shouldn't look at too hard because there was something about her, something that could make him feel peaceful and sure of himself at one moment, and that spiralled uncertainty and a nervous tension through him the next. He guessed that was some kind of feeling for her. He twisted over on the rapidly-warming bed sheets at that thought.

The room was hot and getting hotter, and he pulled back the cover, kicking it free of his feet and rolling onto his back, his eyes opening by themselves, forcing him to stare at the shadowy ceiling.

"You asleep?" he asked, turning his head to look at the sofa.

"Mmm?"

She sounded on the verge of sleep, had probably been asleep, he thought disgruntedly. He couldn't sleep.

"What's wrong?"

Her voice was more awake, and he felt a slight shiver, at odds with the heat surrounding him, too aware that in that in this semi-dark cocoon of heat in the middle of a city that didn't give a crap about him, he wanted to talk.

"Did I wake you?" he procrastinated, unable to even turn his head to look over at her.

"No," she said from the darker shadow of the sofa. "It's too hot to sleep."

"Yeah."

"Dean?"

He closed his eyes. "I keep trying to forget," he said, the words coming out slowly. "You know?"

She didn't answer but he could feel her listening, could feel a strange sense of expectancy, but not pressure. She knew the basics already, the fallen angel in Egypt had told her. Somehow, that made it easier.

_Do you really think that a little heart-to-heart, some sharing and caring, is gonna change anything? Hmm? Somehow... heal me? I'm not talking about a bad day here. The things that I saw... there aren't words. There is no forgetting. There's no making it better. Because it is right here ... forever. You wouldn't understand. And I could never make you understand._

He'd said that to his brother, and at the time, he'd thought he could leave it at that, could learn to live with the memories that he could sometimes bury, sometimes not. It'd been less than a month later that he'd told Sam a little more. And even less time than that when the source of his shame had come out, driven by a self-comparison with the children whose lives had been mangled by their own family.

He knew that had been a mistake. It hadn't lessened the way he'd felt about himself and it had fractured the relationship he'd been trying to rebuild with his little brother, although he hadn't known that until later. That confession had stabbed him in the back when Sam had thrown his weakness back at him, driven by the blood and the siren's poison and all that had gone wrong between them, their secrets and lies.

He swallowed uncomfortably, wanting a glass in his hand, pushing that thought impatiently aside. She'd seen the nightmares.

"Sam chose Ruby," he said. "Chose a demon over me."

For a moment he couldn't say anything else, shocked by the way that'd come out. He'd thought he could tell her about the nightmares about Hell.

There was a soft exhale from the sofa.

"We – uh – when you left, it was getting worse and worse," he continued, stumbling a little over the memories. "We locked him up, in Bobby's panic room, trying to – fuck, I don't know – dry him out, but he got out. And he went looking for Ruby, and by the time I found them –"

He told her about the confrontation in the motel, the words rushing out now. Told her about Zachariah and being trapped in the angel's room. Told her about Cas and the angel's help that had come too late.

"He was standing in front of the altar and Ruby was saying somethin' to him, I don't know what but she was laughing and Sam – Sam looked like – he – it was too late, Lilith was dead and her blood opened the cage and –"

Another shiver rippled down his back. He'd killed the bitch and grabbed his brother and tried to pull him out but the light had been getting brighter and brighter, and the sound, a high-pitched whine that'd been turning into a screech, had been just about turning their brains to mush.

"We were in that convent one minute, then on a plane, over Ilchester, and there was a – this – uh – beam or pillar or something of light that nearly knocked us out of the sky," he said, his face screwing up at the memory of it.

"Did he go back to the blood, after?" Ellie asked softly.

Dean shook his head. "No. I don't think so," he said, uncertainly. "Rufus and Ellen and Jo got caught up with the first horseman, War, and we – we went to help out and I think he was feeling it then, not so much the physical side. That's when we split up."

He couldn't look at her. The question he needed the answer to remained locked inside, deep inside.

"The blood didn't change Sam," Ellie said quietly, and he heard a rustle as she sat up on the sofa. "It … builds on whatever's there, it develops everything."

Some part of him had known that, but hearing out loud was like a slap. He wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that Sam never would've abandoned him before he'd started drinking it, but he couldn't say that because even as he thought it, he knew it was a lie.

"He's not a monster," he said instead.

"No, he's not," Ellie agreed. "Jess was killed when it seemed like he was never going to go back to hunting," she added thoughtfully. "I wonder how much further back he was being manipulated, pushed into a certain mindset."

The idea took his breath away and he lay on the bed, silent, the years flashing by, too fast really for him to see them clearly, too fast to be able to pick out moments that might have been crucial, might have been a push or a nudge from something that wanted his brother uncertain about himself, or his life … or his family.

"I can't trust him, now," he told her, hating himself for that admission, knowing it was the truth. He didn't think it was just the kick-in-the-gut reaction of what'd happened.

"It's not over, Dean."

Scowling at the ceiling, he said, "I know that. But –"

"He needs you and you need him," she cut him off, and he heard the rustle of the sheet that covered her. "You know that, and you know he's already floundering, with what happened, how he was … played, manipulated."

He did know that. He didn't want to admit it, but he knew it. Bobby's living room flashed into his memory and he screwed his eyes shut, not wanting to relive that moment, unable to stop it from replaying against the darkness.

_No, damnit! No. I gotta face the facts. Sam never wanted part of this family. He hated this life growing up. Ran away to Stanford first chance he got. Now it's like déjà vu all over again. Well, I am sick and tired of chasing him. Screw him, he can do what he wants._

_You don't mean that._

Bobby's voice had held a hush of shock that prodded him into realising that he had meant it. Every word. His heart had been breaking.

_Yes I do, Bobby. Sam's gone. He's gone. I'm not even sure if he's still my brother anymore. If he ever was._

The old hunter had told him Sam was drowning and he'd known that too. Hadn't wanted to look at it, but he'd known it.

"They can get to us too easy if we're together," he said to Ellie, his voice a little thicker than usual. Clearing his throat self-consciously. Forcing back his memories and the prick behind his eyes at the feelings they'd brought with them.

"Maybe they can," she agreed softly. "That's a risk you have to take. You're stronger together, Dean."

_What can I say? I don't break easy._

_The angel had just smiled at him. Oh, yes ... you do. You just got to know where to apply the right pressure._

"No. We're not. Sam's my weak point, Ellie," he said, his voice low. "They know it."

Another rustle from the sofa and then she was there, by the side of the bed, her hair loose and brushing over his chest as she sat down next to him, her face ghostly in the faint city light.

"Everyone knows that, Dean," she said to him, leaning closer. He could smell the light scent of her, soap or shampoo, her own scent and he felt his heart beat a little faster. She smelled good.

"That's never stopped you before," she continued, looking down at him.

He wriggled higher against the pillows behind him, too vulnerable lying flat on his back with her leaning over him. Not vulnerable, he corrected himself, as he shifted a bit further away, not _just_ vulnerable.

"It was Sam's choice," he said, struggling to find the arguments that'd been so clear just a second before. "He wanted to stop hunting, figure out what was happening to him."

"Do you think he will?"

"I – I don't know," he admitted reluctantly. That was the truth. He had no fucking idea if his brother could figure it out, but he couldn't help.

She was silent for a few moments, turning her head to look through the grimy window at the buildings on the other side of the street, giving him her profile. Too much of her profile, he thought, his gaze jerking back up from the swell of her breasts under the thin singlet. A flush of heat spread through him and he looked away.

_She probably wouldn't say no_. Sam's voice in his head again, and the combination of the memory and the too-recent view sparked a deeper involuntary shiver.

"Ellie –"

"Can you –" she said, over his tentative question, then stopped, turning away from him, sliding off the edge of the bed and looking back. "Sorry, what were you going to say?"

For a moment, he felt sure he could say it, ask, then the moment passed and he looked away, shaking his head. "Nothing. Nothing important, what were you going to say?"

"Can you live with yourself if Sam does need your help and you're not there?" she asked.

He dragged in a deep breath. She'd seen it, he didn't know how. The worst of the things he'd refused to think about. She'd seen it and just dumped it out in the open, in his face where he couldn't ignore it.

He couldn't. It hadn't even taken Bobby's nasty crack about being a princess to know that no matter much he'd wanted to let Sam sink or swim on his own, he couldn't.

And that hadn't changed, he realised. But at the same time, he didn't want to rescue Sam again. If his little brother even needed rescuing. He'd felt at peace, mostly, the last few weeks. Getting up every morning, knowing what he was doing, not having to explain himself or justify his actions or even fight over the hot water he used. That had changed things. And he hadn't been able to find the place in his heart … his soul … where he could look at what had happened and accept it.

The mattress dipped a little, and he looked up, eyes widening as he stared into Ellie's eyes, no more than a couple of inches from his, his heart slamming hard into his rib cage as he felt her breath over his lips then the touch of her mouth on his, the kiss searing through his thoughts and wiping them out, his eyes closing involuntarily as the pressure on his lips increased.

Then she was gone and he opened his eyes, blinking at her. "Wh-what was that for?"

She was standing by the side of the bed and she smiled. "To stop you from churning through your guilt and get your head clear," she told him.

He closed his mouth, belatedly aware it'd been open. If she thought that was going to help his state of mind, she was sorely fucking mistaken, he thought dazedly.

"Just set it aside, Dean," Ellie continued, walking around the end of the bed to the sofa and sitting down. "Let it go and get some sleep."

He watched her lie down on the sofa, shrugging the sheet back over one shoulder.

There was no way he could sleep now. His mouth was tingling and the sense memories of her body, pressed against his in the subway carriage, had come back with a vengeance and he rolled onto his stomach, stifling a soft groan at them.

His brain was dragging back all those moments, those moments of the last couple of days when they'd been too close, he realised. That shocking low voltage charge that had hit him, and he'd thought, her, when he'd worked the cream into her shoulder. The way she'd looked, in that black outfit, cool and elegant and so out of his league, he'd thought, but she'd been in jeans and tee shirt when they'd gotten back and she made him laugh, and he'd made her laugh and it wasn't forbidden, or anything, but it would be dumb. It would wreck something he didn't want wrecked. Something he couldn't afford to screw up.

Then what? Why was he suddenly so fucking _aware_ of her? Why had just touching her sent a jolt from his fingers to his groin? And what was the deal with the crocotta's voice?

His thoughts were churning around aimlessly. He closed his eyes and stopped trying to force away the images that came in the darkness. If he had to spend the night being tortured by his imagination it was a lot better than being tortured by his memories, he thought vaguely, letting the fluxing heat build in him without trying to ignore it.

* * *

_"Dean, oh …oh … don't stop."_

_Her arms were wound around his neck, her body arching up to meet him with every long, slow thrust, shuddering as he withdrew. It felt … it felt like nothing else he'd experienced. It felt safe. It felt like he'd come home. He looked down into her face._

_"Open your eyes, Ellie, I want to see you," he murmured against the satiny skin of her throat, pushing in deeper, harder, shivers racing down along his nerves as the sensations continued to centre, to concentrate unbearably._

_She opened them for him, the dark auburn lashes fluttering as one long leg slid over his back. He looked into jade irises, flecked with gold, rimmed in dark blue, the pupils hugely dilated as she came closer, stroke by stroke, to reaching orgasm. He bent his head, his tongue slipping between her lips at the same time as he filled her up. She clutched at his shoulders, pulling him deeper._

_"Uh … oh faster now, deeper now, Dean."_

_The words, the huskiness of the desire in her voice, her half-opened eyes staring at him … he didn't know which it was, or whether it was all of it, but he groaned as he fought desperately for control. He took a deep breath and began to move faster, harder._

_"Tell me, say it," he whispered against her ear. "I need to hear you say it."_

_"I love you, Dean." She looked up at him and he felt her coming around him, rocking him hard deep inside of her. He trembled on the edge and then fell, shaking uncontrollably as he held her tightly, thrusting reflexively as he came, and came, pulsing through him into her and not stopping, his vision greying out at the edges._

"Dean?"

He frowned as she seemed to ripple and dissolve under him. He could hear her voice, from far away, but she was here, under him, her body relaxed, her arms holding him, he was inside of her, deep in her warmth.

"Dean? Come on, wake up."

His brows drew together more tightly as she disappeared from beneath him, and the dream dropped away completely as consciousness took hold, squeezing his eyes shut when he realised he'd lost the last fragments.

"Yeah?" He opened an eye, meeting the same pair of eyes that had, so recently, been unfocussed with desire and satiation. His body reacted to them. He sighed inwardly.

"No bodies found in Central Park last night – or anywhere else with a matching MO."

She smiled at him. He wriggled upward into a sitting position, grateful to see that he'd at least pulled the covers over himself at some point.

"Good. Great." He looked around, rubbing the heel of his hand against his eyes. "Any coffee?"

She put a tall cup on the bedside table, steam still rising from the lid. A cellophane-wrapped piece of apple pie joined the cup. He looked at the pie, then back to her, one brow lifted questioningly.

"You wanted to celebrate," she reminded him, turning away and gathering her notebook and pen from the sofa. Her bag was sitting on the end. He noticed that she was dressed, her hair drawn back in the familiar long braid, not a strand out of place now. She'd been up for a while, he thought.

"Yeah." He picked up the cup and sipped the steaming fresh coffee, feeling the jolt from the caffeine hit his veins. "I was thinking of someplace –"

"I hate to celebrate and run, but I've got to get going," she interrupted, glancing around the room carefully, then going to the table to pick up her own coffee. Carrying it to the end of the bed, she looked at him as she sipped it. "Sorry, what were you saying?"

That explained the bustling around and the fact that the linen from the sofa was gone, he thought, his gaze flicking around the room. Her stuff, as little as it'd been, was gone as well. He looked at her, then down to his cup. "Uh, nothing. Where are you going?"

"Alaska," she told him, her attention on prising the lid free from her coffee cup. "An old friend is having a problem, so I'm getting a flight this morning."

"Just like that?" He lifted an eyebrow.

"Well, yeah." She looked at him curiously. "What's the matter?"

He shook his head. He didn't know why it bothered him, didn't know why he suddenly wanted to tell her not to go. He didn't have the faintest idea of what the hell was going on inside his head. "Nothing."

She finished her coffee and tossed the cup into the trash can. Walking over to the big leather bag that sat at the end of the sofa, she picked up her boots and sat down.

Dean watched her, lifting the cup and swallowing another mouthful of the ambrosial coffee as he tried harder to wake up. "You think I should find Sam?"

"I think you need to be clear on how the consequences of not being around are going to impact – not just you, but Sam and everything's that's going on," she hedged, looking at the floor.

"He made his decision."

"Does that change anything?"

He looked at her sharply. "You want me to keep going back, apologising for something I didn't do?"

Sighing, Ellie shook her head. "No."

"Then what?"

"Just be honest with yourself about how it's going to feel, down the line."

It was going to feel like crap, down the line. It already felt like crap, he thought, turning away from her and grabbing the pie, tearing the cellophane from it. He looked at it for a moment then put it back on the nightstand, setting the coffee beside it.

Just a short break, he thought, flicking a sideways glance at her. Just a bit of time to himself, to think about what he wanted. Never going to happen, he realised. Whatever had been meddling in his life, it wasn't interested in what he wanted or what happened to him. _God has work for you_, Cas'd said.

"Question?" he asked, turning back to Ellie.

"Yeah, sure." She looked sideways at him as she pulled on her boots.

"Are you … uh … happy?" He caught a fleeting expression of something crossing her face before she ducked her head and stood up. It was gone before he could identify it.

"Yeah, mostly happy." She looked away from him, out through the window behind him. "What about you?"

The corner of his mouth lifted slightly, wry and rueful, he hoped. "Yeah, mostly happy is about right."

She nodded and picked up her bag, slinging it over her shoulder.

He tried to think of anything else to ask, to talk about, to keep her around for a few more minutes at least. The words were jammed up in his throat and wouldn't come out. He didn't need anyone. Didn't need the comfort of company, or the ease of being himself, just talking, just being.

"See you sometime." She turned and walked to the door, closing it behind her firmly.

For a few seconds, he sat there, staring at the closed door, his pulse pounding against the base of his throat. He did need people, he admitted to himself. Not many of them, but someone he could trust. Someone who wouldn't let him down when he needed them the most.

"Sometime soon," he said to the empty room.


End file.
